The checkpoint rungs: why EV behaved the way it did, priced in R.

The ladder

Eight rungs, and every structure is a selection of them.

Lay every branch and variant's checkpoint prices on one R axis and the system's full monetization ladder appears: 0.75R (Time-Conservative's first rung and Overflow's partial), 1R (the family's central event — Normal and Trend Partial's banks, Overflow's close), 1.25R (Time-Conservative's second rung), 1.3R (Time-Aggressive's delayed bank), 1.4R (Exposure-Conservative's added rung and its trail point in the conservative trend variants), 1.6R (the trend family's trail unlock), 1.8R (Trend No-Partial Time-Aggressive's delayed unlock), and 2R-plus (Normal's target and the extension diagnostics beyond). No structure uses all eight; every structure is a specific selection — which is precisely why the per-rung hit rates explain per-variant EV. The variant's design says which rungs it needs; the battery says which rungs showed up.

Conditional structure

The rungs chain — and the chain is where diagnosis lives.

The rungs aren't independent probabilities; they're a conditional chain, and reading them as a chain is the whole diagnostic craft. A trade reaches 1.3R only through 1R; the 1.6R unlock only matters on trades still open to reach it; the R-ladder conditional read — given 1R was hit, what was the expected final R? — is the manual's own formulation of the question. The chain structure localizes problems with surgical precision. Time-Aggressive weak while Standard holds: check 1.3R conditional on 1R — if 1R holds and 1.3R fails, the market is paying the standard bank and dying before the delayed one, indicting variant selection conditions, not the setup. The trend family underperforming: is 1.6R being reached (a continuation problem) or reached-then-poorly-harvested (a trail management problem)? Each fork in the chain is a different repair.

• A rung's hit rate is judged against its own history and its variant's requirement — never against another rung's.
• The high rungs are structurally rare: 1.8R evidence accrues on quota-limited TNP-TA usage, and its verdicts ripen in quarters.
• Falling conversion between two adjacent rungs is the tightest finding attribution produces — one interval, one mechanism, one question.

The selection loop

Hit-rate evidence is what earns and revokes variant usage.

The battery isn't retrospective decoration — it's the live input to the selection matrix's evidence gates. Time-Aggressive's use-when conditions require a validated 1.3R hit rate before the variant may be chosen; TNP Time-Aggressive requires validated 1.8R evidence on top of everything else; Exposure-Conservative earns its place when 1.4R is often hit before reversals; and the avoid-when columns are written in the same currency — weak 1.6R conditional rates disqualify the runner-heavy structures. This closes a clean loop: variants are selected on rung evidence, their trades generate new rung evidence, and the updated battery adjusts what next month's selections can justify. The rungs are simultaneously the explanation of last period and the eligibility criteria for the next one.

The honesty requirement

Rung data comes from the price path, or it's fiction.

The battery inherits the lab's strictest QA rule: hit flags are entered from the actual price path, never inferred from the final outcome. A trade that closed at +0.6R may have touched 1.4R on the way; a trade that closed at +2R passed every rung below it, but only the chart says when and whether the BE trigger armed in between. Backfilling flags from outcomes systematically corrupts the conditional chain — it makes the high rungs look exactly as reachable as the outcomes suggest, which is the one thing the battery exists to measure independently. This is why the capture document records hit flags contemporaneously and why TradeZella's path data referees them on Saturday: the rung battery is only an explanation layer if the rungs were actually observed.

The key idea

EV moves are rung moves — find the rung and you've found the mechanism.

Every variant EV change decomposes into some rung's hit rate changing, because the structures are deterministic functions of their checkpoints. That's what makes Layer 3 the explanation layer rather than another scoreboard: it converts 'this variant weakened' into 'this specific interval of the trade's life stopped converting,' which is a mechanism, which is repairable — or at least correctly attributable to conditions, selection, or design. The ladder is fixed, the flags are honest, and between those two facts, why becomes a measurable question.