The budget is spent in four equal slots, and the fourth one is not optional.

The assumption

The per-trade figure is a quarter of the budget, whether or not four trades appear.

The panel offers one per-trade value per pool figure, and it is that pool divided by four. There is no column for what to do with three setups, and no alternate table for a cycle where only two qualify. The absence is deliberate: the per-trade value is the authorised maximum for a single position, and it is derived on the assumption of an even four-way split because that is the only division under which four concurrent trades sum exactly to the budget. What the panel does not do is tell the operator to spend the whole pool. It tells them the largest a single trade may be, and the cycle's actual deployment depends on how many slots get used.

Unspent is not wasted

A cycle with three qualifying setups is a three-trade cycle, not a redistribution.

The instinct when a slot goes unused is that the budget should still be spent — the account is authorised for twenty-nine percent, three setups appeared, so each could carry a third of the pool instead of a quarter. The system does not permit this and the reason is not arithmetic timidity. The pool is a ceiling on total exposure derived from capital state, not a quota to be filled, and the per-trade value is a separate ceiling on how much any one position may cost. Redistributing to fill the pool would breach the second ceiling while honouring the first, which is exactly the configuration the derived per-trade value was constructed to make impossible. The correct outcome is a smaller cycle, and a smaller cycle is a normal thing rather than a shortfall.

Where the split does flex

The chain shrinks the trade count or the size, and never concentrates.

There is one situation where the four-way assumption genuinely has to bend: open positions from a previous cycle are still consuming capacity, so the remaining pool cannot support four fresh trades at the authorised per-trade value. Every available response preserves the even split. The default reduces the number of fresh trades and keeps each at viable size. The compression mode holds the count at four and reduces every trade's size equally. The exception mode deploys four at full size and accepts exposure above the pool. Not one of them funds a single slot at more than the per-trade ceiling, which means the even split survives every mode the system offers, including the one designed to break the pool constraint.

Why concurrency matters here

The four positions are live together, so their sum is the account's real exposure.

The even split would be a weaker idea if the four trades were sequential, because then only one position's risk would be live at a time and the pool would describe a budget spent over a period rather than an exposure held at a moment. Concurrency is what makes the sum meaningful: at the height of a cycle, four positions are open simultaneously and the account genuinely stands to lose the pool if all four resolve against it. That is also why active risk on carryover positions has to be subtracted before fresh deployment — a carryover trade is not a past cycle's business, it is current exposure occupying part of the same simultaneous total the pool describes.

The discipline

Count the slots, not the opportunities.

The practical translation is that a cycle's size is decided by how many slots are available and how many setups genuinely qualify, in that order, and never by how attractive the qualifying ones look. Two open positions leave two fresh slots regardless of how many candidates the market offers. Three qualifying setups produce three trades regardless of how much pool remains unspent. The per-trade ceiling is fixed by the authorised row and does not rise because fewer trades are being taken. Every one of those statements sounds obvious written down and each describes a place where an operator under pressure reaches for the alternative, which is why the panel offers no cell in which the alternative can be expressed.

• The per-trade figure is a ceiling on one position, not a share of a quota.
• Fewer setups produce a smaller cycle — never the same cycle in larger pieces.
• All three throughput modes preserve the even split, including the exception mode.

The key idea

Equal funding is what makes a cycle a measurable unit.

Beyond the risk argument there is a measurement one. Because every slot in every cycle is funded at the authorised per-trade value, cycles are comparable to each other and results attribute cleanly to branches and tiers rather than to how large each individual bet happened to be. A system that varied size within a cycle would still produce returns, and its attribution would be contaminated at the source — a strong branch and a heavily-funded branch would be indistinguishable in the record. The even split costs some theoretical optimality and buys a record whose numbers mean what they appear to mean.