Everything about NoVo — the design, the honesty, the refusals — comes down to one simple agreement: NoVo reads the market; you make every decision and place every order. This is the manual-first contract, and it's the foundation the whole product rests on. Understanding it is understanding NoVo.
The two halves of the contract
NoVo reads. It maps the dealer positioning live, tells you what that structure has tended to mean, and keeps a scored record of its own reads — misses included. You trade. The directional call — the judgment that is your edge — stays yours (manual-first, human-in-the-loop), and so does everything after it: strike, size, stop and exit, decided by you and placed by you at your own broker, inside boundaries you set and you enforce. Human judgment on every decision; the machine's job is the map, the history, and the score.
Why it's a “contract”
Because it's a promise built into the architecture, not a setting: NoVo has no connection to your brokerage, places no orders, and never touches money. It cannot trade your account, so you are never handing control to a black box — there is no control to hand. Everything NoVo produces is information you can check against its own record, and everything that happens in your account is something you did.
The manual-first contract: NoVo reads and keeps score; you decide, you size, you place every order. Every feature is just this promise, kept.
Why everything else follows from it
Once you see the contract, the rest of NoVo makes sense. It's non-custodial because your money is yours. It gives structure, not signals because you decide. It won't promise you profits or claim an edge because the trading is yours. Every honest position in this entire pillar flows from the same source: you're the trader, NoVo is the tool, and every order is yours. That's the manual-first contract, and it's the whole of what NoVo is.