Compression score: capital freedom expressed as a ratio.

The normalization

Why six, and what the ratio means.

The gate ladder spans a fixed span of ranks, so dividing the month's average rank by six maps any month onto a zero-to-one scale where the endpoints are meaningful rather than arbitrary. A pure Growth month reads 1.0000. An average near Recovery reads about 0.8333, near Buffer 0.6667, near Floor 0.5000, near Deep-Floor 0.3333, near Ground-Floor 0.1667, and System Lock reads 0.0000. The normalization does two jobs at once: it makes months comparable regardless of length, and it produces a figure that charts and feeds cleanly into composite metrics — which is exactly what pressure and structural health then do with it.

The bands

Four published thresholds, and what each one is describing.

The score reads against four interpretation bands. From 0.85 to 1.00 is a strong structural position — the account spent the month at or near full capital freedom, deployment mostly unconstrained. From 0.65 to 0.85 is moderate compression: the ladder was engaged for meaningful stretches, tier ceilings binding at least part of the time. From 0.40 to 0.65 is heavy compression — the month was substantially conducted in defensive gates, with pool rows re-priced downward and recovery running at reduced tiers. Below 0.40 is critical compression, a month where capital freedom was largely unavailable and the system was operating in survival posture for most of its sessions.

The polarity caveat

A documented QA flag: which direction is 'good' depends on the reader.

The framework carries an explicit standing warning about this metric, and it deserves respect rather than resolution-by-assumption. The Regime Engine's scoring logic treats compression as a defensive stress input — lower is stronger in that context — while the broader workbook's Advanced Monthly Metrics interpretation treats a high compression score as expansion integrity preserved. Both readings are internally coherent; they differ on whether the number is naming the constraint or the freedom. The manual's instruction is to audit the direction before live reliance, because a polarity inversion here silently flips one of six regime inputs and can push a month's classification a full band in the wrong direction. It's a genuine open item, flagged honestly rather than papered over.

• Confirm the polarity in your own workbook before trusting a regime classification that hinged on compression.
• The ratio itself is unambiguous — 1.0 is Growth, 0.0 is Lock. Only the scoring direction is the open question.
• This is what a well-run QA layer looks like: a known ambiguity carrying a visible flag rather than a confident guess.

What it adds

The metric that makes months comparable at all.

Raw gate history can't be compared across months of different lengths, different drawdown paths, and different session counts. The compression ratio can: it's a single bounded number describing what fraction of full capital freedom the month actually operated with, and it means the same thing in January as in November. That comparability is what enables the sequence reads that matter — a compression series drifting from 0.88 down through 0.71 to 0.62 across a quarter describes a system progressively losing capital freedom, and it says so in a form that charts, feeds composites, and stands up in a review record.

The key idea

Normalize once, and every downstream question gets easier.

One division turns an unbounded average of gate ranks into a bounded, chartable, comparable ratio with four published interpretation bands. Pressure and structural health both consume it; the regime engine scores it; the monthly review reads it. That's the return on a simple normalization done early — and the polarity flag riding alongside it is the reminder that even simple metrics earn trust through audit rather than elegance.