7-Tier MC Benchmark — The Two Questions
How MARS uses this
Both benchmark questions — inside the envelope? and why? — are answered on this overlay. Position inside the band answers the first at a glance; the shape of how live equity tracks, hugs, or diverges from the median is where the second question begins.
How it benefits you
You stop grading months by feel. A flat quarter inside the band stops causing panic edits, a hot streak at P85 stops justifying size increases, and genuine model breaks get caught by classification instead of by pain.
Question one is position. Question two is the shape of the tracking — both live on the same overlay.
The key idea
In practice
Equity percentile fan across 50,000 simulated paths. Violet is P10-P90, blue is P25-P75, the gold dash is the median, and the green line is live equity drawn against the envelope.
Question one
Equity path against percentile bands, drawdown against drawdown distributions, gate dwell against simulated gate dwell, tier usage against the model. Inside the envelope means the system is doing what its rules predict — including the painful parts.
Question two
When live behavior leaves the envelope, the deviation gets classified before it gets judged:
The payoff
03Favorable alpha, normal variance, execution drag, excessive drawdown, governance failure — five names, five different responses. The taxonomy is what turns 'I feel like it's going well' into a classified, answerable state.
The second question's teeth
When live performance sits somewhere inside the envelope, the why decomposes: which branches drove the gap, what the tier dwell contributed, how friction compared to model. The discipline is refusing summary words — 'strong month', 'choppy conditions' — until the attribution rows have said the same thing in numbers.
Before you go deeper
Connected inside MARS
Go deeper
Deep dive — 01
Inside the envelope or not — and if not, what kind of gap? Everything else is supporting evidence.
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Deep dive — 02
Which branch, which exit style, which failure mode, which throttle state — four tables, no adjectives.
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Deep dive — 03
The upper bands flatten at target. Locked paths are not slow paths. Sign conventions are not cosmetic.
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One price. Eleven workbooks, three TradingView indicators, and the full manual library — $497.
