Not whether the month was easy. Whether it was handled well.

Layer 01 — What the score is made of

Compliance dominates, compression modifies, direction breaks ties.

The health composite is weighted toward plan compliance, with preserved capital freedom contributing the next largest share and the month's directional gate change contributing a small final term. Compliance carrying the heaviest weight is the doctrinal statement of the whole metric: the system is judged first on whether its own rules were followed, because rule adherence is the only input the operator fully controls and the only one that predicts anything about the next month.

Layer 02 — The counterweight

Health is read against pressure, never on its own.

Pressure measures how heavy the month was. Health measures how well the system handled it. Read separately, each one misleads: a low-pressure month with mediocre health is a warning that discipline is slipping while conditions are easy, and a high-pressure month with strong health is evidence that the machinery works, which is exactly the evidence a green month cannot supply. The pair is the reading, not either number.

• Low pressure with weak health is the most under-rated warning on the board.
• High pressure with strong health is the only condition that genuinely proves resilience.
• Both weak is the combination the regime ladder pushes toward its negative group.

Layer 03 — The output trap

Grading outputs alone teaches the machine to flatter.

A health check that reads only results will bless every lucky streak and panic at every variance cluster, because results are the noisiest thing the system produces. Structural health inspects the machinery instead: stability, drift, efficiency, agreement, and adherence. A machine can produce good months while rotting and bad months while sound, and only the machinery view tells those two apart while there is still time to act on the difference.

Layer 04 — Where the threads come from

Health is a rollup, so its inputs are auditable individually.

The composite draws on expectancy trend, drawdown posture, the agreement between the two quality metrics, acceleration slope, variance and regime state, and adherence. Because each of those is published as its own pipeline with its own six tables, a health verdict can always be decomposed back into the reading that produced it. A composite score that cannot be taken apart is an opinion with a number attached, and this one is built specifically so it can be.