CP3 — Layer 01 · Evidence
The Journal. Where trades become truth.
Read this first
What gets captured
01A controlled trade ledger, not a casual diary.
Each entry captures the full identity of a trade so every downstream rollup inherits clean truth. The manual is blunt about the stakes: if the Journal is wrong, every rollup becomes wrong.
- Trade-level capture across branch, pair, session, and setup context
- R-based accounting so results are comparable across account sizes
- Fee and swap capture feeding net-of-friction expectancy
- Adherence flags that make discipline measurable, not anecdotal
- Manual-vs-auto discipline: date, branch, risk, outcome, hit flags, BE status, fees, MAE/MFE, duration, and notes are entered; Risk $, Outcome $, Fees % of 1R, and Fees % of balance auto-calculate and get verified
The operating rhythm
02Daily entry. Saturday reconciliation.
Every closed trade is entered the day it closes — with auto-calculated fields verified rather than trusted. On Saturdays, entries are reconciled from paper capture sheets against broker records before the weekly review runs. That reconciliation step is what lets the Weekly Summary Engine, EV Scorecard, and every housed engine treat the Journal as ground truth.
Position in CP3
03The foundation layer of the operating ledger.
The Journal is Layer 01 of Compliance Panel 3. Everything above it — weekly rollups, gate state, expectancy scoring, branch risk, compounding dynamics, and the three housed engines — reads from this layer. Nothing in MARS is allowed to contradict it.
Friction truth
04Fees are captured per trade because edge dies retail-quietly.
The Journal records fees and swap as a percentage of 1R on every entry, and that granularity is not bookkeeping zeal — a strategy paying 12% of its risk unit in friction is a different strategy than one paying 4%. Net-of-friction expectancy starts here, at the row level, where the drag can still be attributed to pairs, sessions, and hold times.
How MARS uses this
Every proposed rule change - stop policy, branch weights, fee model - is cloned into a scenario profile and resampled against the same evidence. The grid renders the trade-offs, and only profiles whose edge survives without deepening the P10 tail earn candidate status for live promotion.
BASELINE
LIVEcurrent governing profile
TIGHTER STOPS
REJECTEDEV cost exceeds drawdown saving
TNP WEIGHT +10
SANDBOXedge up, adverse tail deepens
FEE MODEL B
CANDIDATEfriction saving survives resampling
How it benefits you
System changes stop being vibes-based. The tempting tweak that costs 0.07R of expectancy for a modest drawdown saving gets rejected by arithmetic before it silently taxes six months of trading - and promising candidates carry their evidence with them into review.
Four scenario profiles judged side by side: expectancy, adverse-tail cost, and a verdict. Changes graduate through this grid or not at all.
Worked example
The MARS operating loop: execute, capture, score, gate, throttle, deploy - every cycle feeding evidence into the next.
Connected inside MARS
This module doesn't work alone.
Go deeper
Operator briefs on this territory.
Deep dive — 01
Ten fields are typed. Four compute. The boundary is not arbitrary.
If the sheet can compute it, the operator must not type it. Duplication is where records rot.
Read the full brief →
Deep dive — 02
Fees are recorded as a share of 1R, and the unit is the whole point.
A strategy paying 12% of 1R in friction is a different strategy from one paying 4%.
Read the full brief →
Deep dive — 03
Reconcile before you review, or the review audits itself.
The same two steps in the other order stop being an audit and become a search for confirmation.
Read the full brief →
Every module ships in the complete MARS package.
One price. Eleven workbooks, three TradingView indicators, and the full manual library — $497.