What an open trade is worth: active risk, floating R, and the zero line.

The two numbers

Cost-if-wrong versus worth-if-closed-now.

Active Risk % answers one question: if this open trade stopped out right now, what would the account lose? It's a liability figure, computed from the current stop location, and it's the number the entire capacity system runs on. Floating R answers a different question: what does the position show as unrealized P&L at this instant? It's an asset estimate, revalued tick by tick, and the console carries it with an explicit doctrine tag — context only, never treated as realized EV proof. The separation matters because the two numbers routinely tell opposite stories: a trade can float +0.8R while still carrying its full −1R of active risk, which means it is simultaneously 'winning' and consuming exactly as much capacity as the moment it opened.

Why floating R is demoted

Unrealized profit is the most persuasive bad advisor in trading.

The demotion isn't bookkeeping pedantry — it's a defense against the specific ways floating profit corrupts decisions. Floating R begs to be spent: mentally banked as a cushion that justifies the next trade's extra size. It begs to be defended: management decisions warped to protect a paper number the system never counted. And it begs to be reported: a green week of open positions feeling like evidence when the evidence system, correctly, sees nothing yet. MARS answers all three at once by giving floating R no role in any calculation that matters: it doesn't reduce active risk, doesn't expand capacity, doesn't touch EV, and doesn't enter the journal. Until the close, the profit is a forecast — and the system doesn't deploy capital against forecasts.

The breakeven event

The zero line is where a trade stops costing the cycle anything.

The most consequential moment in an open trade's accounting life isn't the entry or even the first partial — it's the stop reaching breakeven. At that instant, active risk goes to zero: the trade can no longer cost the account anything, and the console's rule is explicit — if the stop is at breakeven, active risk should normally read zero. The capacity consequence is immediate: smart capacity sizes fresh deployment around active open risk, so a breakeven'd trade releases its claim and the cycle's remaining envelope expands accordingly. A banked partial pushes the floor above zero — worst case is now a locked gain. This is why the branch exit models treat the breakeven trigger as a first-class structural event: it's the moment a position transitions from liability to free option, and the deployment system notices the same second.

• Breakeven releases capacity; it does not release the cycle slot. The trade still occupies one of four slots until it closes.
• A partial banked before breakeven reduces active risk proportionally — the accounting tracks the remaining position's stop, not the original size.
• Manual override of smart capacity is allowed but logged — and the doctrine adds: do not pretend risk disappeared.

The cycle-level view

Aggregate open exposure is how cycles breathe.

Scale the single-trade accounting up to the cycle and the system's breathing becomes visible. Four slots, each contributing its current active risk to an aggregate open-exposure figure; fresh trades sized inside whatever the authorized pool has left after that aggregate; and the aggregate itself falling as stops advance — each breakeven event exhaling capacity back into the cycle. A cycle early in its life is capacity-tight and slot-loose; a mature cycle with trailing runners is often the reverse, slots full but active risk near zero. Reading a cycle correctly means reading both resources, and the open-exposure tab exists so neither is ever estimated. The alternative — deploying against remembered exposure — is how accounts end up risking pool budgets they've already spent.

The key idea

Count what a trade can take, not what it might give.

The whole open-trade doctrine compresses into that sentence. Active risk — what the market can still take — governs capacity, sizing, and cycle math with full authority. Floating R — what the market might give — informs the operator and commands nothing. And the breakeven event, where the first number reaches zero, is the accounting moment the exit models are built to reach quickly and honestly. It's a conservative way to count, and deliberately so: a system that deploys only against secured states is a system whose worst day is always already priced.