The equity table carries four numbers the fan chart cannot show.

What the chart omits

A fan shows where the bands are, not who is still in the race.

The bands answer one question — at this point in the year, what equity values sit at each rank. They cannot answer how many of the ranked paths are still trading, how many finished, or how many are frozen corpses holding their position in the low percentiles. All of that lives in columns beside the bands, and an operator reading only the chart is reading the geometry of a population whose composition they have not checked. The composition changes what the geometry means, sometimes dramatically, and it changes most at exactly the horizons where operators do the most reading — late in the year, when completions and locks have both accumulated.

Above start

The lowest bar in the table, and the one worth checking first.

The share of paths above starting equity is a crude measure and a useful floor. It answers whether the ordinary outcome of running this system for this long is any capital at all, which is a different question from where the median sits. In a healthy configuration the figure is high and unremarkable. Where it matters is in comparison across configurations — a sizing change that improves the median while cutting the above-start share is trading the typical outcome against the base rate of simply not going backwards, and that is a trade most operators would decline if the column were in front of them. On the fan chart it is invisible, because a chart of ranks cannot show a threshold count.

Above prior period

Improvement rate, which is not the same as level.

The share of paths that improved on the previous period measures momentum across the population rather than position within it. It is the column that gives a below-median placement its proper context: an account at P40 in a period where a minority of paths improved is having an ordinary experience of a difficult stretch, while the same P40 in a period where most paths advanced is a placement with a question attached. This is the closest the equity table comes to a regime read, and it costs nothing to note. It also protects against the reverse error — attributing to skill a period in which nearly the whole population moved forward.

The two exit columns

Completion and lock are both permanent, and they distort opposite ends.

The remaining two columns count paths that have stopped. Completions cap at target and press the upper percentiles flat, which is the flattening the fan's construction brief explains. Locks freeze at their terminal depth and sit permanently in the lower bands, holding them down. Both are exits, both accumulate with the horizon, and together they mean that a late-year fan is describing a mixed population of live paths, finished paths, and dead ones. Reading the bands without the two exit shares is reading a race photograph without knowing which runners are still moving — the picture is accurate and the interpretation is unrecoverable.

How this changes a read

The same placement means different things at different compositions.

Consider an account at P55 late in the year. If a substantial share of paths have already completed, the population above the account includes many that finished rather than many that are outrunning it, and the placement is better than it looks. If instead the locked share is high, the population below includes many that are dead rather than many that are struggling, and the placement is worse than it looks — the account is being flattered by corpses. Neither adjustment appears on the chart. Both are one column away, and noting them converts a placement from a rank into a rank with a population attached, which is the only form in which a rank means anything.

• Read the completed share before concluding anything about the upper bands.
• Read the locked share before taking comfort from distance above the lower ones.
• A placement quoted without its horizon composition is an incomplete measurement, not a conservative one.

The key idea

The fan is the illustration; the table is the instrument.

Every chart in the simulation layer is a rendering of a table, and the rendering necessarily drops what will not fit on two axes. In this case what drops out is the entire question of who is still in the population being ranked. The columns are not supplementary detail — they are the composition that makes the geometry interpretable, and they take about ten seconds to read. The fan is what gets screenshotted. The table beside it is what the screenshot means.