The real prerequisite is not capital or experience.

The misleading prerequisites

Capital, experience, and analytical taste are all weaker filters than they look.

The obvious qualifiers turn out to predict very little. A small account can operate the framework faithfully; a large one can ignore it. Years of experience produce better trade selection and no improvement whatsoever in self-assessment under pressure, which is the capacity actually at issue. Comfort with spreadsheets helps with the first fortnight and stops mattering after that. What separates operators who get value from those who quietly stop opening the workbooks is none of these — it is whether they can sit with a report that disagrees with their own account of how things are going.

What the machine actually reports

Three findings, and the second one is about the operator.

Expectancy is the comfortable finding — it describes the method, and a poor reading can be received as information about a strategy rather than about a person. Adherence is not comfortable. It counts the trades taken outside the checklist, the overrides used, the sizes exceeding what the gate authorised, and it does so without weighting them by how justified they felt. Drift is subtler and often lands hardest: the slow movement of branch mix, sizing, or management away from the specification, none of it decided, all of it visible in aggregate. Two of the three are reports on behaviour.

Why this is harder than it sounds

Everyone consents in advance; the consent is tested later.

Nobody buying a measurement system objects to being measured — at purchase, the prospect of honest feedback is precisely the appeal. The consent is not tested then. It is tested in the third month, when the adherence count is higher than expected, during a stretch where the operator already feels defensive, and when the cheapest available response is to stop updating the workbook for a week. That response requires no decision and announces nothing. It is how most measurement systems end, and it has nothing to do with the system being wrong.

What consent looks like operationally

Recording the disagreement instead of resolving it.

Practical consent does not mean agreeing with every reading. It means letting the reading stand in the record alongside the operator's account of it, rather than adjusting one to match the other. A month classified as underperforming, with a note explaining why the operator believes the classification is context-driven, is a functioning system. The same month reclassified because the explanation was persuasive is not. This is the same discipline the framework applies to itself — the benchmark refreshes on approved change and never because a live week felt unrepresentative — applied one level up, to the operator's relationship with their own results.

The honest exchange

What is given up, and what is received for it.

The trade should be stated plainly rather than sold. What is surrendered is the ability to hold a flattering narrative about one's own trading, which is genuinely valuable to hold and is what most traders are protecting when they resist measurement. What is received is the ability to distinguish a bad stretch from a broken system, to know which branch is carrying the account, and to expand deployment on evidence rather than on confidence. Those are worth more, and the exchange is real: the comfort is not preserved alongside the knowledge. It is spent on it.

• Expectancy reports the method; adherence and drift report the operator.
• Consent is tested in the third month, not at purchase.
• Functioning consent records the disagreement rather than editing the finding.

The key idea

The system selects for a willingness, and says so.

It would be easy to describe the entry requirement in terms that flatter every reader — serious traders, committed operators, professionals. The accurate version is narrower and less appealing: this suits people who would rather know than feel good about not knowing, and that is a genuine preference rather than a virtue everyone secretly holds. Being explicit about it is not modesty. It is the same honesty the instruments are built to deliver, applied to the question of who should be operating them.