Common questions, straight answers.

No. Arcthane is a research tool. We surface and rank publicly available federal contract awards and related events. We do not make recommendations to buy or sell securities. You make your own decisions.

Both plans start with a 7-day free trial. You pick a plan, enter a card, and get full access immediately — nothing is charged until the trial ends, and cancelling before then costs nothing (one click in your account page). No separate free tier: you try the real product.

We re-score the universe every 2 hours and push alerts as soon as a meaningful signal lands on a ticker you're watching. Signals caught late are flagged honestly — a signal that says "likely priced in" is the one that saves you money.

Public federal sources: contract awards and subawards, SAM.gov solicitations, appropriations and budget lines, SEC filings, FDA decisions, the Federal Register, patents, and sanctions lists — plus market data (options and sentiment) to detect when the tape already believes it. Everything a score is built from is shown on the signal's detail page.

Our scoring engine weighs materiality against market cap and revenue, the history of what similar awards did to similar stocks, and the macro regime the signal lands in. We don't publish the exact recipe — that's the moat — but every score is reproducible from sources we show you, and the realized results are published on the track record page, losing buckets included.

Pulse is the full live stream, watchlists, and alerts — for people who follow defense and infrastructure stocks because knowing first is genuinely fun. The Terminal adds component-level score breakdowns, the market regime layer, the historical comparison engine, extended contract history, portfolio analytics, and priority support — for people whose job depends on it. Current prices are on the pricing page; annual billing gets two months free.

Yes — one click in your account page. No prorating tricks, no retention dark patterns. Annual plans simply run to the end of the paid period.

No. Portfolio tracking is manual — you log positions, we score them and alert you when the historical edge fades. We never ask for brokerage credentials.

Neither. Subscriptions are the entire business model, which keeps the incentives pointed one way: the signal has to stay sharp enough that you keep paying for it.

It's better than audited — it's live. The numbers on the track record page recompute from realized outcomes, use fixed buckets assigned at signal time, and include every bucket that underperformed. Take the 7-day trial and check the feed against the record yourself.