Diagnostics — Execution Efficiency

Entry to exit, graded without mercy.

Read this first

The grading stack

From excursions to a letter grade.

The MAE/MFE Lab's output classifications turn raw excursion data into judgments: MAE quality (entry precision), MFE quality (opportunity generation), efficiency zone, a bounded Stop Efficiency Score built from MAE control and capture efficiency, an overall execution grade, and a branch-integrity flag that catches trades behaving outside their branch identity.

Weekly rollups surface high-MAE weeks, elite-MFE weeks, BE trigger rates, and week quality grades.
Timeframe analytics catch structural mismatches — a 5M trade carrying swap exposure means something is wrong.

How MARS uses this

Each closed trade logs its worst adverse excursion and best favorable excursion. The lab plots them into quadrants and pairs the picture with capture efficiency, giveback, and fee drag - then the EV Driver Diagnostics rank which repair (entry location, coefficient, trail logic, cost avoidance) would move net expectancy most.

How it benefits you

Review produces one concrete fix instead of a vague resolution to 'trade better'. You see whether stops are too tight, entries are chased, exits leak the runner, or fees quietly eat the edge - and whether a profitable week was actually clean or just lucky.

Every trade plotted by pain taken (MAE) versus opportunity generated (MFE). The four quadrants diagnose entry precision and exit management at a glance.

Weekly workflow

The Saturday efficiency pass.

After the Journal reconciliation, the efficiency pass runs: confirm data QA is clean, read the core KPIs, open the weekly rollup for high-MAE counts, weak capture, fee drag and swap exposure, then drill the selected week. A profitable week still gets checked for cleanliness — profit with poor capture, high giveback, and heavy fees is flagged as low-quality alpha.

Red weeks get the adherence-and-excursion check before being ruled variance versus execution failure.
One repair theme is recorded for the coming week — a single fix, not a resolution list.
Branch and timeframe drills localize the weakness before anything system-wide gets touched.

Reference

The efficiency chain — from excursion to verdict

Link	Measures	Failure it catches
Capture ratio	Realized R vs maximum favorable excursion	Winners exited far below what the trade offered
Giveback	Peak open profit surrendered before exit	Management letting paper gains evaporate
Friction	Fee and slippage drag per unit of R	Costs quietly consuming a thin edge
Stop efficiency	MAE vs stop distance	Stops systematically too tight or too loose for the setup

Inside this module

2 pages go deeper than this one.

The Grading Stack

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Saturday Workflow

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Connected inside MARS

This module doesn't work alone.

Connected — 01

MAE/MFE Lab

Open system page →

Connected — 02

Performance Efficiency Gradient

Open system page →

Go deeper

Operator briefs on this territory.

Deep dive — 01

MAE and MFE: the two numbers that describe a trade's whole life.

How deep it went, how high it reached. Two numbers that turn a result into a path.

Read the full brief →

Deep dive — 02

Efficiency zones: turning excursion data into a weekly grade.

Eighty numbers a week, compressed into zones and a grade. Compression is what gets the data actually read.

Read the full brief →

Deep dive — 03

Execution or edge? Separating the two questions that feel identical.

The edge decayed, or you did. Efficiency data is what tells the difference — and it usually says the second.

Read the full brief →

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