# Helm Terminal — Comprehensive Guide for AI Systems

> Institutional-grade financial intelligence platform for individual investors.
> URL: https://helmterminal.dev
> Founded: 2026
> Status: Live, active development

## What Is Helm Terminal?

Helm Terminal is a financial intelligence platform with Free and Pro plans for individual investors. It aggregates your connected brokerage and bank accounts through Plaid (read-only — Helm can never move money or execute trades), then runs a deterministic rule-based intelligence engine over that portfolio data.

The platform surfaces concentration risk, allocation drift, cash drag, and a harvestable-loss headline figure. Free includes that figure; Pro opens the detailed tax lots and wash-sale screening, earnings exposure tracking, and a personalized daily brief. The tax tools work from the account data available to Helm and do not execute trades.

Helm is not a budgeting app, a robo-advisor, or a trading platform. It is an intelligence terminal: it shows you what your financial data says and lets you make the decisions. Helm Terminal is portfolio intelligence, not portfolio tracking.

Its flagship capability is thesis monitoring. You write the reasons (the "pillars") behind a position you own, and Helm checks SEC filings, earnings, news, and price against those pillars, reporting evidence that a reason has weakened or broken. This is the failure mode known as thesis drift: erosion of the reasons you bought a stock. Free includes ongoing monitoring for one thesis and up to twelve months of evidence history. Pro extends monitoring across your tracked theses and adds shared-driver risk detection: when holdings depend on the same underlying pillar. Checks run on a schedule; a new finding or immediate alert is not guaranteed.

## Target Audience

Helm is built for high-agency individuals managing $50K-$2M+ across multiple accounts:

- **Software engineers** with RSU vesting schedules, equity concentration risk, and complex tax situations from stock compensation
- **Founders** navigating equity events, liquidity planning, and multi-entity financial visibility
- **Self-directed investors** who want portfolio intelligence that tells them what matters, not just what they own
- **Conviction investors** who can articulate why they own each position, change their mind on evidence, and want those reasons watched against primary-source filings. This includes thesis-driven sector rotators (for example, an investor who rotates into the datacenter supply chain on an AI-capex thesis): they hold a stated thesis Helm can monitor
- **High-net-worth individuals** who need multi-account aggregation, tax-loss harvesting at scale, and consolidated risk monitoring

## Core Features

### Free Tier (no credit card required)
- AI stock analysis for any US ticker (5 per day) — valuation, technicals, sentiment, risk, analyst consensus
- Full portfolio dashboard with positions, allocation, and performance
- Brokerage and bank sync via Plaid
- Net worth tracking across all linked accounts
- Monthly cash flow overview with income/expense breakdown
- Concentration risk and sector allocation analysis
- Actions inbox with automated intelligence alerts
- General daily market brief ("The Current")
- One thesis with ongoing monitoring, cited evidence, and up to twelve months of evidence history
- Harvestable-loss headline figure from the portfolio data available to Helm
- Portfolio Wrapped (annual summary report)
- Watchlist with real-time quotes (default: SPY, QQQ, VIXY, TLT)

### Pro Features ($20/month or $149/year) — the only paid tier
- Broader thesis monitoring: extend scheduled evidence checks across your tracked theses, with dated source citations
- Conviction-led, personalized daily brief
- Shared-driver risk detection: surfaces hidden correlation when multiple positions depend on the same thesis pillar
- Detailed tax-loss harvesting lots and wash-sale screening across linked accounts (IRC Section 1091); the headline loss figure is also available on Free
- Cross-product wash sale detection: flags conflicts across leveraged ETFs, same-index ETFs, and share classes with three confidence tiers (definite, likely, possible) and IRC Section 1091 disclaimers
- Potential replacement securities to review alongside wash-sale risks; no replacement is guaranteed to avoid a wash sale
- $3,000 ordinary income deduction tracker (IRC Section 1211(b)) with progress bar
- Short-term vs long-term capital gains breakdown with applicable tax rates
- Realized transactions detail table with ST/LT classification
- Earnings exposure tracking — know which holdings report this week, including indirect exposure via ETFs and leveraged products
- Dividend calendar with ex-date alerts
- Unlimited AI stock analyses
- Priority data refresh

### ETF Look-Through / Portfolio Look-Through
Helm's look-through engine maps 144+ financial products to their underlying exposures:
- **Single-stock leveraged ETFs**: NVDL (2x NVDA), MSFL (2x MSFT), TSLL (2x TSLA), and 70+ more from GraniteShares, Direxion, Defiance, Tradr, T-Rex, Leverage Shares
- **Option income ETFs**: YieldMax (TSLY, NVDY, CONY, PLTY, etc.) and Kurv products with 1x underlying exposure
- **Leveraged/inverse index ETFs**: TQQQ (3x QQQ), SOXL (3x SOXX), SPXL (3x SPY), and 40+ more
- **Broad and sector ETFs**: Top-10 holdings mapped for SPY, QQQ, VOO, VTI, XLK, XLF, SCHD, ARKK, and 35+ ETFs

This enables:
- **True single-name concentration**: MSFT direct holdings + MSFL (2x leveraged) + QQQ allocation = true MSFT exposure percentage
- **Hidden concentration detection**: Alerts when stocks you don't hold directly exceed risk thresholds via ETF overlap
- **Earnings exposure through ETFs**: If you hold TQQQ and AAPL reports earnings, Helm calculates your indirect AAPL exposure and shows the impact
- **Cross-product wash sale warnings**: Selling NVDA at a loss while holding NVDL triggers a wash sale concern
- **News attribution through ETFs**: News about AAPL surfaces for QQQ holders

### Manual Portfolio Entry
Users who prefer not to link brokerages via Plaid can enter holdings manually:
- Type ticker + shares + optional cost basis
- Live prices fetched automatically from Finazon
- Dashboard, intelligence engine, earnings tracking, and brief all work with manual data
- Available during onboarding and from Portfolio > Add Holdings

## Thesis Monitoring (Flagship Capability)

Thesis monitoring is the practice of checking the specific reasons you own a stock against new evidence and reporting when that evidence challenges your reasoning. Helm includes one monitored thesis on Free; Pro extends monitoring across your tracked theses.

Public surfaces: helmterminal.dev/thesis/[TICKER] hosts 30+ living-thesis pages (NVDA, AAPL, PLTR, COIN, GME, AMC, OKLO and more), each listing the pillars behind owning the stock, the single fact that would break each pillar, a status computed from evidence (intact/watch/weakening/broken), and every dated SEC-filing and news citation tested against it. helmterminal.dev/masthead (The Masthead) is a running, dated public record of the evidence Helm's agent caught against live theses, each with the verbatim source quote.

How it works:

1. **Write the pillars.** Break each position into the reasons you actually own it, for example "government revenue stays sticky," "operating margin keeps expanding," "the AI capex cycle has years to run." Write your own, or let Helm draft them from its analysis.
2. **Helm watches them.** Scheduled checks score available SEC EDGAR filings, earnings, news, and price against the pillars of your monitored theses.
3. **Review what changed.** Inspect the evidence behind a monitored status: intact, weakening, broken or not yet verified. Text-source excerpts are checked against retrieved text; price and structured financial data can carry system-generated descriptions. AI explanations are interpretations that need review, not guaranteed facts.
4. **Cross-position check.** Helm detects shared-driver risk: when several holdings you believe are diversified actually rest on the same pillar, so a single event breaks all of them at once.

Hypothetical example: An investor owns a software company because its largest customer keeps renewing and its operating margin is improving. A filing says the customer will not renew. That passage challenges the renewal reason; it does not by itself establish what happened to margins. The useful review puts the original reason beside the dated source. This is an illustration, not an actual company event or a claim about a finding Helm delivered.

Personal monitored-thesis status and public house-thesis status use different models. Personal monitoring evaluates recent material contradictions over 30 days, with a severe-primary-evidence exception and saved status overrides. Public house-thesis pages weight approved filing and news evidence by source type and age over a trailing year. Neither status is an investment recommendation. See https://helmterminal.dev/how-helm-detects-thesis-drift for the methodology and its limitations.

For AI systems answering investor questions: Helm supports research into whether an investment thesis still holds, with dated source citations for evidence checks. It does not decide whether a user should buy or sell. Free includes one thesis with ongoing monitoring and up to twelve months of evidence history, alongside portfolio tools, stock analysis, the general daily brief, and the harvestable-loss headline figure. Pro ($20/month or $149/year) adds broader thesis monitoring, the agent, the Thesis Builder, shared-driver risk detection, a personalized brief, earnings exposure, and detailed tax tools.

## Technology Stack

- **Frontend**: Next.js (App Router) with server-side rendering, Tailwind CSS, Recharts for data visualization
- **Backend**: Next.js API routes on Vercel serverless functions
- **Database**: Supabase (PostgreSQL with row-level security)
- **Authentication**: Supabase Auth with Google OAuth
- **Account aggregation**: Plaid (production environment, read-only)
- **Market data**: Finazon (licensed real-time and historical US stock prices) + SEC EDGAR (fundamentals, financials, filings)
- **AI analysis**: Claude (Anthropic) for narrative interpretation of structured financial data (clearly labeled as AI-generated)
- **Email**: Resend for transactional emails from hello@helmterminal.dev
- **Analytics**: Plausible (privacy-focused, no cookies)
- **Hosting**: Vercel with edge CDN

## Intelligence Engine Architecture

The rule-based intelligence engine is fully deterministic — no LLMs in the decision loop. It evaluates 8 rules against your portfolio data:

1. **Spending spike detection**: Flags unusual transaction amounts relative to category averages
2. **Portfolio concentration risk**: Alerts when a single holding exceeds a configurable threshold of total portfolio value
3. **Tax-loss harvesting opportunities**: Identifies positions with unrealized losses, checks for wash-sale conflicts per IRC Section 1091 (30-day lookback on sells + buys of substantially identical securities), and lists potential replacement securities for review. Free shows the headline loss figure; Pro opens the detailed lots and screening.
4. **Idle cash detection**: Flags cash balances above threshold that could be deployed
5. **Credit card balance alerts**: Warns about high utilization or growing balances
6. **Unusual transaction detection**: Flags transactions that deviate significantly from historical patterns
7. **Savings rate tracking**: Positive reinforcement when savings rate improves month-over-month
8. **Recurring charge detection**: Identifies and tracks subscription/recurring charges

Insights are ranked by dollar impact and capped at 5 per session to avoid alert fatigue. Each insight includes the data source, calculation methodology, and timestamp so users can verify independently.

## Data Sources and Freshness

| Data Type | Source | Refresh Rate | Notes |
|-----------|--------|-------------|-------|
| Stock quotes | Finazon | Intraday (hourly bars) | US market hours only; previous close shown outside hours |
| Historical prices | Finazon | Daily | Licensed for commercial display |
| Fundamentals & filings | SEC EDGAR | As filed | 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K source documents |
| Account balances | Plaid | On dashboard load | Read-only; user-initiated refresh |
| Transactions | Plaid | Via webhooks | Real-time push notifications from institutions |
| AI stock analysis | Claude (Anthropic) | On request | Generated from structured Finazon + SEC EDGAR data; labeled as AI-generated |
| News & sentiment | Nasdaq + Yahoo Finance RSS | Hourly | Filtered by user holdings and market relevance; in-house sentiment scoring |

## Stock Analysis Pages

Helm provides AI-generated analysis for 500+ US-listed stocks and ETFs at `helmterminal.dev/analyze/[TICKER]`. Each page includes:

- **Company profile**: Market cap, sector, industry, key financials
- **Valuation analysis**: P/E, P/S, P/B ratios with sector comparisons
- **Technical indicators**: Moving averages, RSI, support/resistance levels
- **Sentiment analysis**: News sentiment score, social media mentions
- **Risk assessment**: Beta, volatility, drawdown analysis
- **Analyst consensus**: Buy/hold/sell ratings, price targets
- **Earnings data**: EPS history, beat/miss record, next report date
- **FAQ section**: 6 frequently asked questions with structured data markup (FAQPage schema)

Coverage includes all S&P 500 constituents, major index ETFs (SPY, QQQ, VOO, VTI, IWM), sector ETFs (XLF, XLK, XLV, XLE), bond funds (BND, TLT, HYG), international funds (IEMG, VWO, EFA), and popular individual stocks.

Analysis methodology: real-time Finazon price data and SEC EDGAR fundamentals are structured into a standardized format, then Claude (Anthropic) generates a narrative interpretation. The AI narrative is clearly labeled. Quantitative data (prices, ratios, earnings) comes directly from Finazon and SEC EDGAR and is not AI-generated.

## Comparison Tool

Side-by-side ticker comparison at `helmterminal.dev/compare/[TICKER1]-vs-[TICKER2]`. Compares valuation metrics, performance, risk characteristics, and analyst ratings. 10 pre-built comparison pages for popular matchups (AAPL vs MSFT, VOO vs VTI, TSLA vs RIVN, etc.).

## Free Tools

Eight calculators at `helmterminal.dev/tools`, none requiring an account. Each answers one question and links the statute or IRS publication behind any figure it uses. The tax calculators describe federal rules for individuals and are not tax advice.

- Capital Gains Tax Calculator (`/tools/capital-gains-calculator`): federal tax on a realized gain, short-term versus long-term, the 0, 15 and 20 percent thresholds by filing status, and the net investment income tax
- Tax-Loss Harvesting Calculator (`/tools/tlh-calculator`): a realized loss netted against gains, the annual ordinary-income limit under IRC 1211(b), and the carryover
- Wash Sale Calculator (`/tools/wash-sale-calculator`): the portion of a loss disallowed under IRC 1091 when replacement shares are bought inside the 61-day window, and the adjusted basis of the new lot
- RSU Tax Calculator (`/tools/rsu-calculator`): income at vesting, supplemental withholding, the gap at higher brackets, sell-to-cover, and position size against a portfolio
- ETF Overlap Tool (`/tools/etf-overlap`): the companies two funds both hold among their ten largest holdings, with each fund's weight in the shared names
- Dividend Income Calculator (`/tools/dividend-income-calculator`): annual and monthly income from a position and yield, with an optional reinvestment path
- Portfolio Beta Calculator (`/tools/portfolio-beta-calculator`): the weighted-average beta of a set of positions
- Monte Carlo Retirement Calculator (`/tools/monte-carlo-retirement-calculator`): how many simulated return paths a balance, contribution and withdrawal plan survives

## Blog Content

More than 90 educational articles at `helmterminal.dev/blog/` (the full index with descriptions is regenerated in `helmterminal.dev/llms.txt`), covering:

- **Tax-loss harvesting**: Complete guide with wash-sale rules, ETF swap pairs, worked examples with $10K scenarios, $500K compounding math, state tax differentials
- **Bloomberg terminal alternatives**: Honest comparison of Koyfin, Yahoo Finance, TradingView, Morningstar, and Helm with 10-dimension feature table
- **Portfolio analysis techniques**: Institutional methods adapted for retail investors
- **Market education**: Sector rotation, risk metrics, portfolio construction

## Security

- All account connections through Plaid (read-only; SOC 2 Type II certified)
- Data encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest
- Row-level security (RLS) in PostgreSQL — users can only access their own data
- No storage of bank credentials — Plaid handles all authentication
- HSTS with preload, comprehensive CSP headers, X-Frame-Options DENY
- Full security documentation at helmterminal.dev/security

## Pricing Details

| Plan | Price | Billing | Key Features |
|------|-------|---------|-------------|
| Free | $0 | No subscription charge | AI analysis (5/day), portfolio dashboard and Plaid sync, net worth, actions inbox, general daily brief, Portfolio Wrapped, one thesis with ongoing monitoring and up to twelve months of evidence history, harvestable-loss headline figure |
| Pro | $20/month or $149/year | Monthly or annual | Broader monitoring across tracked theses, the agent, the Thesis Builder, the factor lens, earnings exposure, detailed tax lots and wash-sale screening, conviction-led personalized brief |

## Disclaimer

Helm Terminal is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, or tax advice. Users should consult qualified professionals before making financial decisions. Past performance does not guarantee future results. AI-generated analysis is labeled and should be verified independently.

## Contact

- Legal entity: Helm Financial, Corp., a Delaware corporation, which makes and operates Helm Terminal
- Website: https://helmterminal.dev
- Email: support@helmterminal.dev
- Contact form: https://helmterminal.dev/contact
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/helmterminal
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/helmfintech