Anti-gambling design: eight decisions inside Kunkafa Predictions

A screen can flatter you. Put a green arrow, a streak counter and a clock running down in front of someone and it tells them they are right and that they must move now - that is greed talking. Fear says the same thing backwards, and both wreck the next decision. Kunkafa Predictions takes neither side. It shows the paths a market could take, how far each one goes, how long it has, and the chance of getting there, with up and down always in the same view. Eight decisions keep the screen that way, and every one of them cost something.

Why the staging does the damage

The harm in a trading app is rarely in the arithmetic. It is in the staging: what is shown large, what is shown late, what is celebrated and what is met with silence. Compulsive trading is a recognised behavioural pattern with the same shape as gambling disorder - preoccupation, chasing a loss, concealing how much of it is going on - and an interface either feeds that shape or refuses to.

Regulators have started to look at the staging rather than the instrument. The SAFE Bet Act in the United States proposes limits on gambling-like features in trading apps, and the UK's Financial Conduct Authority has warned about gamification in retail investing. That is context for why these decisions matter. It is not a claim about where Kunkafa sits in anyone's rulebook.

Eight decisions

Here they are in the order a reader meets them on screen, each with what it gives up.

1. Both directions, in the same breath

Up and down are never shown apart. Every forecast is four things: how far the price could move, written as a change from today's price in per cent; which way; how long it has to get there; and the chance it arrives. The chance of moving up and the chance of moving down sit beside each other, each labelled with what it measures, so neither can be read as the whole story.

What this gives up is the single flattering number, which reads like a decision already made. Two numbers side by side read like a situation instead, which is what a market actually is.

2. Mint for up, fuchsia for down, never green and red

Up is mint and down is fuchsia. The green and red pair appears nowhere on the screen, because those two colours carry decades of conditioning: green reads as reward and red as alarm before a reader has taken in a single figure. Red is kept for two jobs only, an error and a period that ended behind, so that when it does appear it means something specific.

3. No countdowns, no streaks, nothing to celebrate

Nothing on the screen counts down and nothing on it congratulates you. Durations are how long a forecast has to play out - the slider runs from five minutes at one end to up to 7 years at the other - and a duration is not a deadline to act on. Freshness reads "Updated N minutes ago" rather than a clock draining toward zero, and a market that has gone quiet says so plainly: "No new data for N days".

When a forecast finishes, the outcome is written in the same voice whichever way it went: reached the movement level, passed the movement level, period ended ahead, period ended behind, or still running. There is no celebration for the good ones and no silence for the bad ones. Asymmetric feedback is exactly how an app teaches you to remember your wins and forget everything else.

What this gives up is the loop. There is no streak to protect, so there is no reason to open the app at midnight to protect it.

4. Nothing is metered, so looking costs nothing

Opening a forecast moves no counter. Nothing empties as you read, and nothing is held back to make you come back tomorrow. A plan changes which durations you can open, how many markets you can follow and how many alerts you can keep - not how often you may look. Free is $0; the paid plans are Starter at $10, Core at $49 and Pro at $99 per month, each with a 7-day free trial.

Metering would manufacture scarcity, and scarcity makes people act so as not to waste what they paid for. A reader who checks a market ten times and decides to do nothing has used the tool correctly, and should pay exactly what a reader who checked once pays.

5. Under 100 finished examples, the rate is replaced, not greyed out

When fewer than 100 similar forecasts have finished, the screen prints no success rate at all. In its place it says: Not enough past examples to estimate performance reliably. A rate built on a handful of finished cases is not a weak number to be shown in a lighter grey, it is a misleading one, and a reader will anchor on it anyway.

The same instinct governs the small end of the scale. Where a rate really is below one per cent, it reads "under 1%" rather than a long decimal that would invite a precision the sample cannot support.

6. Filters narrow the list, never the drawing

Three filters sit with the chart: "Only show forecasts at least this strong", "How far it has to go", and a Both / Up / Down switch. All three change which rows of the ladder you read. None of them touches the price line or removes a level from the band drawn around it, because hiding a level would amount to claiming that price cannot go there - and a filter has no business making that claim on your behalf.

7. The efficiency line, said out loud

The product states its own limitation before it states anything else: "Markets are efficient - whatever is known is already in the price, so most forecasts sit near 50/50. Our models watch every update and bring you the few that do not."

Most of what you see will therefore be close to a coin toss, and it is supposed to be. An app that always has something exciting to say about every market on every duration is telling you about its incentives, not about the market.

8. The record sits beside the forecast, not on a marketing page

Under every forecast is a panel called "How similar forecasts performed", with four counts: forecasts evaluated, how many were strong enough for the filter you have set, how many finished in the forecast direction, and how many reached the movement level you selected. You can read it over the last day, 7 days, 30 days or all time, and it is the same panel whether the numbers flatter us or not.

The wider figures are published daily on the Kunkafa results page, with the raw numbers at /api/stats.json for anyone who would rather check them than read about them.

What the eight cost

They cost attention. A screen with no streak, no celebration and no clock gives a reader very little reason to return before they have a decision to make, and the most common honest answer it gives is that there is no clear direction right now. That sentence has never made anyone open an app twice in an hour.

Some readers find the result boring next to a flashier competitor. That is the intended failure mode rather than an accident, and the readers most at risk of trading compulsively are usually the ones who feel it most sharply.

How to check any of this

None of it requires an account. The demo at predictions.kunkafa.com/demo opens the real screen with real markets, so the colours, the ladder, the filters and the record panel can be inspected directly. The Kunkafa methodology page sets out how a forecast is produced and scored, with a glossary at the end of it, and the Kunkafa FAQ answers the questions that come up most often.

Two related pieces go deeper into the thinking behind these decisions: why honest AI is more useful than overconfident AI, and understanding uncertainty, or why both outcomes remain possible.

Forecast, not advice. For the rational investor: emotion out, scenarios in.