Gate transitions are arithmetic events, not judgment calls.

The trigger

Distance from peak is the only input the transition reads.

The gate engine computes one quantity: current equity's percentage distance below the equity peak high. That number is compared against the band table, and the band answers with a gate. Better than −7% is Growth. −7.1% to −13% is Recovery. −13.1% to −19% is Buffer, and so on down through Floor, Deep-Floor, Ground-Floor, and — worse than −40% — System Lock. Nothing else enters the computation. Not the reason for the drawdown, not the quality of the trades that produced it, not the operator's read on whether conditions are improving. All of those things matter enormously elsewhere in the system — in tier selection, in structural diagnostics, in trade choice. They are deliberately excluded here, because the gate answers only one question: how much damage is the account currently carrying?

Why dumbness is a feature

Every input you add to a transition is a lever someone will pull.

A smarter transition rule — one that considered context, momentum, or trade quality — would be a better rule on paper and a worse rule in an account. Each additional input is an argument surface: a place where the operator under pressure can construct a case for staying in the friendlier gate one more cycle. 'The drawdown came from two anomalous news spikes; structurally we're fine' is a sentence every trader has said before their worst month. The single-input design eliminates the argument surface entirely. There is nothing to interpret, so there is nothing to negotiate. The system accepts a small cost — occasionally a gate change fires on a drawdown that context would excuse — to purchase something priceless: transitions that cannot be talked out of.

• Deterministic input: drawdown % from equity peak high. Nothing else.
• Deterministic mapping: the band table is fixed in advance and versioned like code.
• Deterministic timing: the new gate governs from the next cycle boundary — no mid-cycle re-pricing, no retroactive application.

Transitions and the cycle clock

Gates change at cycle boundaries, and both directions wait their turn.

A boundary crossing mid-cycle does not tear up the current cycle's authorization — the cycle was priced under the gate that was active when it opened, and it completes under those terms. The new gate takes authority at the next cycle boundary, when the Throttle Control Panel prices fresh deployment from the new row and ceiling. This applies symmetrically: recovery back across a boundary into a friendlier gate also waits for the boundary. The asymmetry traders want — instant relief on the way up, grace periods on the way down — is precisely the corruption the synchronization rule prevents. One clock, both directions, no exceptions.

The operator's role

You don't decide the transition. You witness it, log it, and comply.

Determinism doesn't make the operator passive — it redirects the work. When a gate changes, the operator's responsibilities are concrete: verify the drawdown computation against the ledger, record the transition in the cycle decision log with the triggering number, re-read the new gate's row and ceiling before the next cycle opens, and note any disagreement for the weekly review rather than acting on it. That last item is where the system learns. If the operator's logged disagreements with gate timing turn out to be systematically right over months of evidence, the band table itself can be revised — deliberately, in calm, through the same versioned process that created it. The bands are not sacred. Mid-drawdown renegotiation is what's forbidden.

The key idea

Determinism is how the system keeps promises to itself.

Every module downstream of the gate — the throttle, the pool rows, the decision log, the Monte Carlo comparison — assumes gate state means exactly what the band table says it means. One discretionary transition breaks that assumption everywhere at once: the log stops being comparable across weeks, the benchmark stops matching live behavior, and the operator learns that boundaries bend. Arithmetic transitions are less intelligent than judgment on any single day and more intelligent than judgment across every year. The system chooses the years.