Judge whether a market FAILED to react to news favorable to a crowded speculative position — step 2 of Jason Shapiro's COT contrarian process. Consumes a cot-contrarian-detector report (or an explicit direction) plus a Claude-curated events JSON, fetches the underlying price series with a documented fallback chain, and produces a fail-closed CONFIRMED / NOT_CONFIRMED / INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE verdict using a statistically validated drift-significance test (not a naive failure-ratio, which false-confirms on pure noise). Generic beyond COT — reusable for PEAD and macro-crowding news-failure checks. Use when the user asks to check news-failure confirmation, whether a crowded market "shrugged off" good/bad news, or wants to run Shapiro step 2 on a CROWDED_LONG/CROWDED_SHORT market.