Operator brief · 03

Smart Capacity: sizing that respects what is already at risk.

The key idea

The viability floor

Below a minimum, a trade is not worth its friction.

Full-throughput per-trade risk is remaining pool divided by maximum fresh trades. When that number falls under the minimum viable fresh per-trade risk — default 3% of the tier average — the mode refuses to deal four undersized trades. Fees, spread, and slippage are fixed costs per position; below the floor they consume the expectancy the position was meant to earn. Smart Capacity would rather deploy three viable trades than four crippled ones. The floor is expressed as a fraction of the tier average rather than a fixed currency amount, so it scales with the account instead of going stale as equity grows.

The suggestion logic

Trade count flexes first, risk quality flexes last.

When capacity tightens, Smart Capacity reduces the suggested number of fresh trades — INT of remaining pool over minimum viable — before it ever degrades per-trade risk quality. This ordering is deliberate: expectancy is earned per position at proper size, so the system defends the integrity of each position and sacrifices quantity. Compress Risk inverts that trade-off, which is exactly why it is a conscious mode switch and not the default. Preserving magnitude and sacrificing count is the only ordering consistent with expectancy being earned per position.

FigureHow a fresh-trade suggestion is produced

Trade count flexes before per-trade quality does. The floor is checked before any suggestion is issued.

Why the floor exists at all

Friction is a fixed cost, so small positions are disproportionately taxed.

Spread, commission, and slippage do not scale down neatly with position size — much of the cost is charged per ticket rather than per unit of risk. A position at a third of normal size therefore surrenders roughly three times the proportion of its expected return to friction, which can push a genuinely positive-expectancy setup below break-even without anything about the setup changing. The viability floor is where that arithmetic crosses zero. Below it the trade is not merely small; it is a different, worse trade wearing the same name, and taking four of them is a way of paying four times to express one idea badly.

What the operator still decides

The mode governs size. It never governs selection.

Smart Capacity answers one question — given what is already committed, what can safely be deployed — and deliberately answers no others. It does not rank setups, express a view, or tell the operator that a trade is good. A suggestion of three fresh trades is a ceiling, not a quota, and an operator who finds only one qualifying setup should take one. This boundary is what keeps the mode trustworthy: a sizing system that started implying which trades to take would be making selection decisions from a position of total ignorance about the chart, and operators would correctly stop believing it.

Why the default is the default

A mode that must be chosen correctly under pressure is not a safe default.

Smart Capacity holds the default position for a behavioural reason rather than a mathematical one. Every throughput mode is defensible in some circumstance, but they are not equally safe to select while a book is under strain — and that is precisely when mode selection happens. Compress Risk is attractive during a run of conviction; Full Tier is attractive during a run of frustration. Both feel most correct at the moments they are most dangerous. Making the conservative mode the resting state means the operator must take a deliberate action to leave it, and that deliberate action is where the documentation rule attaches. Defaults are not neutral: whichever mode requires no decision is the mode that governs most of the account's life.

Graceful failure

The worst case is a smaller day, never a broken account.

Every failure mode of Smart Capacity degrades toward inactivity: capacity exhausts, suggested trades reach zero, and the directive reads stand down. Contrast the unmanaged alternative, where the failure mode is stacked exposure discovered only when correlated positions move together. A system whose worst output is 'do less' is a system an operator can trust through a losing week — and trust through losing weeks is where compounding actually comes from.

Connected inside MARS

Worked Example →

Throttle Control Panel →

Risk-Adjusted Efficiency Ratio →

Edge Sustainability Score →

Every brief documents the same shipped system.

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