Two different pains, two different charts: depth versus duration.

The depth axis

How far — the dimension the gate ladder governs.

Depth is the drawdown everyone means by default: the percentage distance from the high-water mark at the worst moment. It's the dimension with teeth, because recovery arithmetic is convex — deeper holes require disproportionately larger climbs — and it's the dimension the entire gate ladder is built around: every threshold from −7% to the −40% lock is a depth trigger, compressing deployment as the hole deepens. The simulation's depth distribution answers the planning question directly: across governed futures, how deep do the holes get? The median tells you the ordinary year's worst moment; the adverse percentiles tell you what a fully healthy system can still dig, which is the number position-sizing should already have priced in.

The duration axis

How long — the dimension that breaks discipline.

Duration is time below the prior high-water mark: the underwater period, from the peak through the trough to the new high. It threatens nothing on the balance sheet directly — a shallow eight-week drawdown can be financially trivial — but it is the dimension that manufactures abandonment. Every underwater week is a week of doubting the system, and rule-breaking correlates with underwater time far more than with underwater depth: the trader who survives the sharp −15% often cracks in week six of a meandering −8%. The duration distribution exists to inoculate against exactly that: when the simulation shows that governed futures routinely spend multi-week stretches underwater, week five stops being evidence of anything except being in a distribution you were shown in advance.

Why they decouple

The governed system deliberately trades duration for depth.

In an ungoverned account, depth and duration correlate loosely — deeper usually means longer. Governance intentionally warps that relationship: the gate ladder compresses deployment as depth increases, which caps how deep holes get but slows how fast they refill, because the climb happens at reduced tiers. Governed futures therefore show a signature the raw statistics would call strange: shallower adverse depths than fixed-risk simulation, and longer recovery tails than the depths alone would suggest. That's not inefficiency — it's the explicit trade the system makes, survival purchased with patience. Reading the two distributions together is the only way to see the trade being executed as designed rather than misreading the slow climb as dysfunction.

Reading them as a pair

Four quadrants, four different messages.

Live drawdown experience placed against both distributions lands in one of four readings. Normal depth, normal duration: the system is inside its envelope — the correct response is nothing. Abnormal depth, normal duration: a sharp episode beyond the bands — audit sizing, overrides, and gate compliance, because depth is the governed dimension and it exceeded governance's expectation. Normal depth, abnormal duration: the grind — check throttle efficiency and whether compressed-tier recovery is converting deployed risk as benchmarked, but expect the honest answer to be patience. Abnormal on both: the capital-defense scenario — full gate respect, no recovery overrides, formal review. The quadrant does the triage; the operator's job is honest placement.

• Depth beyond bands interrogates sizing and compliance. Duration beyond bands interrogates efficiency — and usually counsels patience.
• A long shallow grind inside both distributions is the system working, however it feels.
• No quadrant, including the worst, authorizes overriding the gate to accelerate recovery. The ladder outranks the discomfort.

The key idea

Prepare for both ordeals, because you will meet both.

The depth distribution tells you how bad the worst moment gets; the duration distribution tells you how long the ordinary ones last. An operator briefed only on depth is armored for the crash and defenseless against the grind — and the grind is the one that actually claims most systems, one abandoned rule at a time. The simulation charts them separately so preparation can be specific: size for the adverse depth percentile, and calibrate expectations for the duration one. The account survives the first by arithmetic. The operator survives the second by having seen it coming.