Six sections, one order, and the failures that end the conversation.

Why order

The discretionary failure mode is resequencing, not skipping.

Operators rarely omit a check outright — they reorder, putting the exciting question first and the sobering ones after commitment. Once the setup has been admired and the entry mentally taken, the sizing and fee questions arrive as obstacles to a decision already made rather than as inputs to one. A fixed sequence makes the sober questions structurally unskippable by putting them where they still have standing. Note where the checklist places Setup: fourth, after market conditions, system authority, and regime have all cleared. The thing the operator is most eager to evaluate is deliberately not first.

What clearance is not

It verifies permission. It never calculates edge.

The manual is explicit that the checklist is not a replacement for analysis and is not meant to calculate the edge — it verifies that the planned trade is allowed within the current MARS authority stack. That boundary matters because a tool that both evaluated setups and granted permission would eventually be argued with. A tool that only asks 'is this allowed?' has no opinion to negotiate against. The analysis happened before clearance; clearance checks the analysis against the arena.

Hard failure

Any hard failure means no trade — the doctrine has no discretionary clause.

The hard-failure list is deliberately concrete rather than principled, because principles get interpreted under pressure and item lists do not. News not clear. Trade does not fit the playbook. Risk or lot size not calculated. Revenge or FOMO entry. Stop distance unknown. Brake state active without the reduced-risk rule applied. Branch/regime mismatch. Fee drag above 2.0%. Triple-swap risk unchecked. Each of these is checkable in seconds and none of them admits a judgment call. That is the design: a hard failure is not a strong argument against the trade, it is the end of the conversation about it.

• Note that two entries are behavioral, not technical — revenge and FOMO are named as hard failures alongside unknown stop distance.
• Fee drag carries an actual threshold (2.0%), which makes it verifiable rather than felt.
• Branch/regime mismatch appears here as well as in section three — the checklist catches it twice on purpose.

The caution rule

One caution sizes carefully. Two cautions skip.

Below the hard failures sits a graded rule that does most of the day-to-day work: if one caution appears, note it and size carefully; if two or more appear, skip unless the trading plan explicitly allows the exception. This is quietly one of the more sophisticated rules in the framework, because it prices the accumulation of small doubts rather than requiring each to be individually disqualifying. Any single caution is survivable and most trades carry one. The second caution is the signal — not because it is worse than the first, but because two independent reservations about the same trade rarely turn out to be unrelated.

The top line first

Declare before you check.

The usage instructions add one small sequencing detail with outsized effect: before running the sections, fill the checklist's top line — date, asset, session, timeframe, branch, and planned risk percentage. Committing those to paper first means the subsequent checks evaluate a specific declared trade rather than a fluid one. Without it, an operator who finds a caution in the sizing section can quietly adjust the timeframe or the branch and re-run the check against a slightly different trade. The declaration is what makes the checklist's answer binding on something.

The cost of clearing

The checklist's only output is permission, and permission is not encouragement.

A trade that clears all six sections has established one thing: nothing in the current authority stack forbids it. That is a lower bar than it feels like at the end of a careful process, and the distinction is worth holding onto. Having run the sequence honestly produces a sense of having done the work, which can quietly convert into conviction about the trade itself. The checklist never said the setup was good. It said the setup was allowed, at this size, in this gate, under this regime — and the operator's own analysis remains the only thing that ever claimed more than that.