Connect your broker, read-only.

The typed position list is the weak link

A manually entered portfolio is a snapshot of intent, not a record of position. It goes stale the moment anything happens: a fill at a different price than planned, a partial sell, a dividend reinvestment, a DRIP fraction, a corporate action, an options assignment, cash left sitting after a sale. None of that gets retyped.

It also silently omits. People enter the tickers they think about and leave out the ETF they bought once and forgot — which is usually exactly where the hidden exposure lives. For a power-user desk that computes weights, correlations and risk analytics, that omission is not a cosmetic problem: every number downstream inherits the error.

On a desk the cost compounds in a specific way. A stale book is not one wrong number in one place — it is every panel disagreeing. The watchlist panel, the exposure view and the AI panel each reason from a different version of what you hold, inside a single workspace, and nothing on screen tells you which one is closest to the truth.

How the read-only link works

Brokerage connectivity is provided by SnapTrade. You authorize the connection with your broker inside SnapTrade’s hosted portal; Cala never receives your brokerage username, password or MFA codes, and what we hold is a per-user access secret encrypted at rest on our servers. Our software requests a read-only connection and the app has no order-placement path — the full security model and the governing entity are documented on A2GROUP LLC coverage and security model.

Linking is optional. Every widget, chart, market-structure panel and AI tool works without a connected account, and you can disconnect at any time.

What changes in the terminal when it sees the real book

This is the part that matters for a $39.99/month desk rather than a phone app. With actual positions — per account, with quantity and cost basis — the analysis stops being qualitative and starts being arithmetic.

Take look-through exposure. A list reading "VOO, QQQ, NVDA, MSFT" looks like four holdings. In weight terms it can be a single concentrated bet on large-cap US tech, held four different ways. Computing the real overlap requires real position sizes; on an equal-weight typed list the calculation is not just imprecise, it is meaningless.

The same weights change what news is worth your attention. "Chip export restrictions announced" is generic. Applied to your actual book it becomes "this touches 31% of your equity exposure across three positions" versus "this touches 1.2%" — same headline, entirely different level of attention warranted. The AI can only rank relevance to you if it knows the weights.

Portfolio-aware answers that still show their work

Nothing about a connected portfolio changes how Cala answers. Every response still runs verified data tools and shows a visible, timestamped tool_step trail, so you can see which tool produced which number. Analysis is grounded in fetched live market data, not guessed.

What the connection changes is the provenance of a portfolio answer. Your holdings stop being an assertion you typed and become a fetched, timestamped input that appears in the same visible trail as the price and the filing — you can see which tool produced which weight, and when it was read. A general assistant takes a pasted list at face value and cannot show you where any of it came from.

The framing stays descriptive. Cala surfaces concentration, exposure and news relevance across what you hold, so you can ask better questions. It does not tell you what to buy or sell, and it produces market context, not personalized investment advice.

Research in Cala, execute in your broker

The workflow is unchanged, and deliberately so. You study options flow, dark pool prints, GEX, filings and congressional disclosures against your real book in Cala, form a view, and then place the trade yourself in your own broker. Cala covers the analysis half only — the pairing thesis in Webull vs Cala Terminal is exactly this, with the portfolio now on the research side of the line rather than retyped.

Read-only means viewing and analysis only. Cala Terminal never places trades, moves money, or holds your assets — your assets remain at your broker. Brokerage connectivity is provided by SnapTrade. Informational only; not personalized investment advice. You are responsible for your own investment decisions.

Which brokers can be linked

As of 2026-07-22 the read-only link supports 25 brokerages and 3 crypto exchanges across the US, Canada, the UK and Europe, Australia and India. For a desk that trades multi-leg or multi-venue, the ones worth checking first are Interactive Brokers, tastytrade, Trading 212 and DEGIRO. Coverage changes; the in-app list is current, and the canonical list and security model are documented on A2GROUP LLC coverage and security model. Broker names identify compatible services; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.

If you want it on your phone too

The same read-only link exists in AI Investing on iOS and Android if you also want it on a phone: the mobile app’s broker coverage.