Pressure score: how heavy the month actually was, weighted four ways.

The four components

Weights that encode a doctrine about what hurts.

Pressure is a weighted composite: average drawdown carries 40%, max drawdown 30%, spike frequency 20%, and gate compression the remaining 10%, with the whole capped at 100. The ordering is a claim worth noticing. Average drawdown outweighing max drawdown says that sustained pressure is more structurally significant than a single bad moment — the same duration-over-depth judgment the gate rank metric embodies, encoded as arithmetic. Spike frequency then captures something neither drawdown figure sees: how often the month produced sharp adverse days, which is a texture read rather than a magnitude one. And compression enters lightly, at 10%, because it's already largely a function of the drawdowns above it — including it at higher weight would double-count.

The bands

Four readings from low to severe.

The resulting score reads against published thresholds: 0 to 25 is low pressure, a month that imposed little structural load; 25 to 50 is moderate; 50 to 75 is heavy; and 75 to 100 is severe. The bands are worth holding alongside a fact the benchmark already established — that fully healthy governed systems produce difficult months on a known frequency. A heavy-pressure month is not evidence of malfunction; it's evidence of load, and the diagnostic question it raises isn't 'what went wrong' but 'how did the system handle it,' which is precisely the question the structural health score exists to answer. Pressure measures the weather. Health measures the response.

The pairing

Pressure alone is uninterpretable — it needs its partner.

Read in isolation, pressure invites exactly the wrong reactions: a low score feels like success and may simply mean the market was quiet, while a high score feels like failure and may describe a month the system navigated impeccably. The metric only becomes diagnostic when paired with structural health, and the four combinations are all distinct. Low pressure with high health is an easy month handled well — pleasant and uninformative. High pressure with high health is the genuinely valuable reading: the system was tested and held, which is the strongest structural evidence the monthly layer can produce. Low pressure with low health is a warning that something is degrading without external cause. High pressure with low health is the month that demands the full diagnostic battery.

• Pressure is an input measurement, not a performance grade — nobody controls how heavy the month was.
• The high-pressure/high-health quadrant is the one worth documenting: proof the governance did its job under load.
• Spike frequency is normalized by trading days, so short months don't inflate the component artificially.

Where it lands

One of six inputs, and never an authority.

Pressure feeds the regime engine as one of six scored metrics, contributing on the same −2 to +2 ladder as the others with no special weight, and its polarity is lower-is-stronger. From there it shapes the month's regime classification and, through that, review posture. What it never does is act: a severe pressure reading compresses nothing, because the gate ladder already compressed deployment in real time on the drawdown arithmetic that produced the pressure score in the first place. The metric is a retrospective description of load the system already responded to — which is exactly why it belongs in a monthly diagnostic layer rather than an operational one.

The key idea

Naming the difficulty is what makes the response gradeable.

Without a pressure measurement, every monthly review implicitly assumes months are comparable, and they aren't — a flat month in calm conditions and a flat month under severe load are different achievements entirely. Scoring the load explicitly, with published weights and bands, is what lets the review ask the only fair question about performance: given what this month actually imposed, how well did the system hold? That question has an answer, and the structural health score is it.