The stack is four engines and the score runs to six. Both numbers are correct.

The split

Two tiers with different jobs, sharing one scale.

The four core engines are the ones the strategy's definition of a continuation depends on: structural position, momentum acceleration, participation, and trend strength. Remove any of them and the concept being tested changes. The two optional filters are different in kind — EMA alignment asks whether the multi-timeframe gear structure is stacked in order, and the ATR slope check asks whether volatility is expanding into the move. Both describe the quality of an environment that the core four have already identified. Neither defines it.

Why score the optional ones

A filter that only ever blocks tells you nothing about the cases it lets through.

The alternative design is obvious: run the optional filters as gates and keep the score at four. It was not chosen, and the reason is that a gate destroys information. As a gate, EMA alignment either stops the signal or is invisible; as a scored component, it distinguishes a continuation with the gear structure behind it from one running without it. Both of those may be tradeable, and they are not the same trade. Scoring keeps the distinction alive in the number and, more importantly, alive in the record — the score at entry is what later analysis can group by.

The unweighted choice

Nothing inside the score claims one engine matters more.

Each passing component adds one point. Ichimoku does not count double for being the structural backbone; the ATR slope does not count half for being optional. This is a real design position and it runs against the practice elsewhere in the system, where composite scores carry explicit weights and the weights are treated as doctrine written as arithmetic. The difference is defensible: a weighted score is appropriate when the relative importance of the inputs is itself an established finding, and it is not established here. An unweighted score refuses to assert a ranking that has not been earned, and leaves the ranking visible in the row detail where the operator can apply judgment to it.

What the number cannot tell you

Four out of six is at least three different situations.

Because the score is flat, identical values conceal materially different states. Four points from the four core engines with both optional filters failing describes a genuine continuation regime in unhelpful conditions. Four points assembled from two core and two optional describes something considerably weaker wearing the same number. The checklist rows exist precisely because the total cannot separate these, and the operating rule follows from it: the score gates attention, and the rows decide the trade. Treating the total as sufficient is the most common way this tool gets misused.

• Four core plus zero optional and two core plus two optional both read as four.
• The core rows are the ones that must be read individually before an entry.
• The optional rows are most useful as a management input rather than an entry filter.

Switching the optional filters

Turning one off changes what every past score meant.

When an optional filter is disabled it stops being able to fail, which quietly raises the effective floor of the score. A four recorded with both optional filters active and a four recorded with them switched off are not comparable measurements, and nothing in the output flags the difference. This is the strongest practical reason to settle the configuration in the plan and leave it there for a whole review period — not because one setting is superior, but because a score is only evidence if it was produced by the same instrument every time it was recorded.

The key idea

A composite is a claim about what belongs in it, and the tiers say the claim carefully.

The stack's design says two things at once: these four define the phenomenon, and these two describe it. Keeping both in one number gives the operator a single figure to scan; keeping the tiers visible in the rows stops that figure from being mistaken for a verdict. The number opens the question and the rows answer it, which is the same relationship every composite in the system has with its components — and the same reason none of them are allowed to travel without their detail.