A partially closed trade reports to two systems at the same time.

The split

Realisation and exposure are separate properties, and a partial separates them.

Before a partial, a position is entirely one thing: fully open, contributing nothing to realised evidence and its whole risk to the pool. After a partial it is both. The banked portion has a settled result that belongs in the cycle's realised record, and it is finished — no future price movement can change it. The remainder is unfinished in exactly the way the rest of the ledger means by open: it has an active stop, a current downside, and it occupies a slot. The ledger handles this with two independent fields rather than one status, which is why a trade can carry a realised contribution and a live active risk figure simultaneously without either being wrong.

The active risk answer

The remainder's burden is what the runner alone would lose, not what the trade would.

The question the field asks does not change for a partially closed position, and the answer has to be computed against the remainder rather than the original size. If half the position was banked and the stop on the runner sits above entry, the honest active risk is what that reduced size would lose from where it is now — which may be zero if the stop is at or beyond break-even, or a fraction of the original commitment if it is not. The instinct to reason about the trade as a whole, netting the banked gain against the runner's downside, produces a smaller figure and a wrong one. The pool does not care that the position is ahead overall. It cares what the account still stands to lose, and the banked portion cannot lose anything because it is no longer in the market.

Why the netting instinct is wrong

Banked profit is capital; it is not a credit against exposure.

The tempting arithmetic is that a partial taken at a profit has bought some room — the account is ahead on the trade, so the remaining risk is somehow underwritten. It is not, and the reason is that the two amounts live in different places. The banked profit is realised capital that has already been added to the balance and will therefore be reflected in the next equity reading and in the drawdown calculation. The runner's active risk is a future loss the pool has to be able to absorb. Netting them counts the profit twice: once when it lifts equity and again when it is used to justify carrying more exposure. This is the same error as treating floating profit as capacity, arriving one step later in the trade's life and wearing more respectable clothing because half of it is genuinely realised.

Where the halves go

The two contributions leave the console through different fields.

Following the two halves out of the ledger makes the separation concrete. The realised portion joins closed-trade evidence, which is graded into the daily expectancy status and the cycle profit tone — and those are subject to the completeness rule, so a partial does not on its own resolve the cycle or lift the insufficient-sample state. The runner's active risk joins open exposure, which travels as the capacity burden the throttle subtracts from the authorised pool. Two different fields in the transfer packet, feeding two different parts of the deployment decision. A single trade therefore appears on both sides of the same packet, and the packet is only coherent if each side received the correct half.

The slot question

A runner still occupies its slot, however small it has become.

One consequence that catches operators is that partial-taking does not free capacity by the count. The cycle's geometry is four concurrent positions, and a position reduced to a quarter of its original size is still a position — it is being managed, it can still be stopped, and it holds one of the four. Freeing the slot requires closing the remainder, not shrinking it. What partial-taking does free is risk capacity, and only to the extent the remainder's active risk is genuinely lower than the original. So the two capacity measures the console tracks — available slots by count, and remaining pool by risk — respond differently to a partial, and reading one as a proxy for the other is how a cycle ends up with five positions of intent against four slots.

• Realised and exposed are separate fields; a partial makes both true at once.
• Active risk is computed on the remainder alone — never netted against banked profit.
• Partials free risk capacity, not slots. Only closing frees the slot.

The key idea

Identity in this ledger is per-portion, not per-trade.

Most journals treat a trade as an atom that is either open or closed, and the design works right up until a position is managed in pieces — at which point the atom has to be either lied about or split. Recording the two portions separately, and letting one be finished while the other is not, keeps every downstream figure honest without any special-casing anywhere else in the system. Expectancy reads the finished part, exposure reads the unfinished part, and neither needs to know that they came from the same entry. The cost is that the operator maintains two numbers for one trade. What it buys is that the partial — which is the whole point of the trend-partial branch — stops being a hole in the accounting.