What the rails actually are.

The four rails

Fixed where it matters. Free where it pays.

Each rail governs one dimension of capital behavior:

• The gate ladder — seven capital states from Growth to System Lock, routed deterministically from Equity Peak High drawdown.
• The seven-tier model — deployment intensity per gate, with pool budgets and per-trade risk expressions.
• Throttle authority — the final deployment decision, resized around open exposure every cycle.
• The audit trail — decision logs, evidence packets, and QA flows that make every decision reviewable.

Why 'rails' and not 'rules'

Rules ask for compliance. Rails remove the steering wheel.

A rule is a promise the operator makes to themselves; a rail is a structure the workflow physically runs on. The distinction is the product: MARS encodes its doctrine into formulas, feeds, gates, and logs so that following the system is the path of least resistance — and departing from it requires a deliberate, logged, visible act.