About

About Contrary Thinker

Finding Tomorrow's Headlines in the Back Pages Today.

Contrary Thinker has published market forecasts since 1989. The work behind it started earlier, on a Merrill Lynch desk, under the man who defined the craft.

The lineage

Jack F. Cahn, CMT+, started in the markets in 1974 in St. Louis. In 1977 he joined Merrill Lynch, and from 1977 to 1982 he served as head market technical analyst coordinator for the St. Louis region.

Merrill Lynch in those years was where technical market analysis was taken seriously as a discipline rather than tolerated as a curiosity, and the reason was Bob Farrell. Farrell ran technical market research there and was the most widely followed technician of his generation. Jack trained under him, alongside George Constantine.

That is the lineage. Not a course, not a certification bought online. Five years inside the research operation that set the standard, learning to read market structure from the person the rest of the industry was reading.

Jack moved to Shearson Loeb Rhodes in 1982 and served as Chief Technical Market Analyst for R. Rowland and Company from 1986 to 1989. Contrary Thinker has published continuously since 1989.

The Market Technicians Association years

Credentials in this business are easy to assert and hard to verify. These are on the record.

• Board of Directors, Market Technicians Association, 1989 to 1995.
• Editor of the MTA newsletter, 1989 to 1994.
• Annual seminar chairman, 1995. That seminar was the Market Wizard conference in Las Vegas, and Jack chaired it.

The Las Vegas conference is worth a sentence of its own. Jack built the program around a simple and unpopular idea: bring in the people who could prove what worked and let them say so in front of a room full of technicians who would rather not hear it. Bruce Babcock stood on that stage and demonstrated that the majority of the audience's own ideas failed under backtesting. Jack invited him deliberately.

The TradeStation nomination

At the 1995 conference Jack nominated TradeStation for MTA Technician of the Year. It won, the first time a trading platform rather than an individual analyst received the award.

Stated precisely, because precision is the point: the award went to TradeStation the platform, then owned and operated by Omega Research and the Cruz brothers, on Jack's nomination to the voting committee. It did not go to Jack personally. He put the name forward and argued the case that a software platform putting rigorous testing in the hands of ordinary traders had advanced the craft more that year than any single analyst had.

Jack has been a third-party plug-in provider with TradeStation ever since, from the Omega Research era to today, and he has belonged to the MTA without interruption across the whole of it. His systems and indicators are distributed through the TradeStation TradingApp Store and on TradingView.

What Contrary Thinker actually does

Most analysts pick one lane. Price analysts read the chart. Sentiment services read the crowd. Cycle analysts read the calendar. Macro shops read the headlines. Each is holding one piece of a three-piece structure.

Market structure equals Volatility, the condition, plus Price, plus Timing Cycle. Volatility leads because it is the condition the other two operate inside. Price and timing mean little until you know whether the market is expanding, contracting, or dead in the water.

Elliott Wave gives you price. Contrarian sentiment gives you positioning. Cycle work gives you dates. Reading all three as one structure is the entire business.

What you can subscribe to

• MarketMap™ Weekly. Cycle position across seven markets and more, the volatility read, the timing window, and the chart work. Issued when the structure changes rather than to fill a slot on a calendar.
• Strategy and Tactics. The tactical layer. Specific positioning drawn from the same structure, with the entry, the exit, and the risk stated.
• The Annual Scenario Planner. Seven issues released at the start of the year, mapping the year ahead across the markets that matter. A standalone product available to anyone.

Who this is for

Self-directed investors, active traders, registered investment advisers, and small fund managers. People who make their own decisions and want the structure in front of them rather than a conclusion handed down.

Contrary Thinker has never advertised its way to an audience. Thousands of subscribers arrived the same way, because somebody told them. That is a slower way to build a publishing business and a more durable one.

Stop being the person who reacts. Become the person who already knew.