Why We Built Thry

I was on a train to work listening to Scott Galloway lay out his theory that European defence stocks were going to outperform. NATO allies were increasing spending commitments, procurement pipelines were accelerating, and the geopolitical logic was hard to argue with. By the time I got to my stop, I was sold.

Then I sat down at my desk and thought: now what?

I agreed with the thesis. But how do I actually invest in it? Which defence stocks? European ones specifically, or does that include UK-listed names? Are there fifteen companies or fifty that fit this theme? Should I just buy the biggest ones, or weight them by how directly they benefit from the spending increase?

And the bigger question: was Galloway right? Or is this one of those ideas that sounds compelling on a podcast but falls apart when you look at the data? What does current financial coverage say? Have any of the YouTube analysts I follow picked this apart?

I had no way to answer any of that systematically. And I realised that was the real problem. Not this particular thesis. Every thesis.

The gap between thesis and portfolio

Here's what I ended up doing with the defence thesis, and every thesis before it: Googled it, read a couple of FT articles, watched a YouTube video, checked the price charts of a few names I recognised, and then made a decision based on incomplete information and gut feel. That's what most retail investors do. It's what I'd always done.

What frustrated me wasn't a lack of conviction. It was a lack of process. Every time I had a market view, I wanted to be able to:

• See if the market narrative agrees or disagrees with my thesis: not just one article, but a weighted view across financial news, current web coverage, and tracked analyst commentary
• See which stocks best express my view: not someone else's ETF with a theme that's close-ish to what I think, but a ranked set of equities specifically aligned to my hypothesis
• Stress-test it historically: if this portfolio had existed a year ago, how would it have performed? What would the drawdowns have looked like?
• See what other people are thinking: what hypotheses are the YouTube analysts and podcast hosts putting out there? Do any of them overlap with mine?

Institutional investors have all of this. They have analyst teams, Bloomberg terminals, portfolio construction models, and sentiment databases. They can test a thesis against hundreds of sources and have a structured view by end of day.

Retail investors have Google and vibes.

What I actually wanted

I didn't want a stock picker. I didn't want an AI that tells me what to buy. I wanted a research framework: a tool that takes my investment hypothesis and turns it into a structured, evidence-based view I can actually evaluate.

Think of it like this: you can buy a European defence ETF, but it's designed around someone else's definition of the theme. It might overweight the biggest names by market cap regardless of how directly they benefit from increased NATO spending. It doesn't know that your thesis is specifically about procurement acceleration: companies with order backlogs that are growing, not just companies that happen to be in the defence sector. Your view is more specific than any off-the-shelf product.

What if you could create a portfolio that expresses exactly your thesis? And what if you could see how the broader market narrative, across financial news and tracked analyst commentary, lines up with or contradicts your view?

That's what I wanted. So I built it.

What Thry does

Thry takes a natural language investment hypothesis and turns it into a structured research report in about 60 seconds. You type something like "European defence stocks will outperform as NATO procurement spending accelerates" and you get:

• A structured bull/bear analysis with key risks and catalysts
• A sentiment scan across current financial coverage and 93 tracked YouTube channels, with explicit source coverage
• A ranked set of thesis-aligned equities showing which stocks best express your view
• A historical backtest showing how those equities would have performed
• An executive summary pulling everything together

It's the process I wished I had. Not financial advice. A research tool that takes the thesis you already have and pressure-tests it properly.

Why hypothesis testing, not stock picking

The framing matters. Thry doesn't ask "what should I invest in?" It asks "is my investment idea any good?"

That's a fundamentally different question. Stock pickers start with a universe of securities and try to find the best ones. Hypothesis testing starts with your view of the world and asks whether the evidence supports it, what the risks are, and how a portfolio expressing that view would actually behave.

The difference is that your thesis is the input, not the output. You bring the idea. Thry brings the infrastructure to test it.

What Thry isn't

Thry isn't a financial adviser. It doesn't tell you what to buy or sell. It doesn't hold an Australian Financial Services Licence. And we're very upfront about the fact that AI-generated analysis can be wrong. Every report comes with clear disclaimers.

It's a thinking tool. A way to move from "I reckon" to "here's the structured evidence for and against, here's how a portfolio would look, and here's how it would have performed."

Try it

You can test two hypotheses per month for free at thry.ai. Type whatever you're thinking about. A macro theme, a sector bet, a contrarian view. And see what happens when you actually put it through a proper process.

We built this because we needed it. We think you might need it too.