Equity Percentiles · The Reading Protocol

Nine steps, in order, every month.

Workflow steps

Cross-checks

Closing verdicts

How MARS uses this

The three-step protocol quotes rows, not vibes: locate equity against its bands, locate drawdown against its own, then let the pair select the interpretation. This table is step one's reference — the band values by horizon, each with the read the protocol permits.

How it benefits you

Percentiles become vocabulary instead of decoration. When you say 'we are tracking P60', everyone - including future you - knows exactly what that means, and sizing debates end by pointing at the P10 row rather than negotiating with optimism.

Band	13 wk	26 wk	52 wk	Operator read
P90	+64.2R	+131.8R	+268.4R	hot path — do not extrapolate
P75	+47.5R	+96.3R	+197.0R	strong but ordinary
P50	+31.1R	+63.9R	+130.6R	the median story
P25	+16.8R	+35.4R	+74.2R	slow — still inside the model
P10	+4.3R	+11.7R	+27.9R	the path sizing must survive

Cumulative R by horizon · 50,000 resampled paths

Step one of the protocol, printed: the equity bands by horizon with their permitted reads.

The pairing rule

Equity position is never read without its drawdown twin.

Step six is not a formality. An equity position in the upper bands achieved alongside drawdown behaviour in the adverse bands describes a system running hot on borrowed risk, and the equity row alone will never say so. Placing both positions before interpreting either forces the read to reflect how the result was purchased rather than only where it landed.

What alpha actually requires

Five conditions, all of them, at once.

Benchmark outperformance on its own is not alpha under this standard. The full definition requires outperformance with controlled drawdown, positive expectancy, efficient risk conversion, clean profit quality, and sustainable acceleration. Any subset produces a different classification: above the model with worse drawdown is probably over-risk, with heavy override use is governance leakage, with weak expectancy is likely variance, and with poor conversion means risk is being wasted rather than deployed.

Outperformance plus controlled drawdown, but weak EV, reads as variance until it persists.
Outperformance plus override frequency reads as governance leakage regardless of the equity row.
Alpha is the intersection of five readings, which is why it is rarer than the equity band suggests.

Cadence, not surveillance

The bands are read at review, and only at review.

Checking position between review slots produces no new information and considerable new emotion. Monthly is the designed cadence for equity, return, drawdown, gate dwell, tier usage, and regime comparison. Weekly review exists but asks a narrower question: whether the current week sits inside normal variance or is creating early stress. Quarterly asks whether the system is still aligned with the model at all, which is when benchmark refresh becomes the topic.

The sample-size caveat

A below-median month is not a finding yet.

The response ladder deliberately assigns monitoring rather than action to the P25 to P50 band, and names sample size as one of the four things to check before escalating. Most single-month gaps close without intervention. Treating each one as a signal produces a system that is re-tuned monthly on noise, which reliably destroys more expectancy than the underperformance it was reacting to.

Reference

The monthly comparison workflow

Step	Action	What it prevents
1	Update Compliance Panel 3 fully for the period	Comparing a benchmark to an incomplete ledger
2	Confirm journal, weekly summary, gate state, EV scorecard, and dashboard are current	A stale panel producing a confident wrong position
3	Collect month-end equity, monthly return, and max drawdown	Mixing sources between periods
4	Enter those values against the live comparison bands	Eyeballing a position instead of locating it
5	Classify the position: above P75, near median, below median, P10–P25, P5–P10, below P5	An unbounded description that cannot be compared next month
6	Cross-check drawdown against its own distribution	Reading equity strength that was purchased with excess risk
7	Cross-check gate dwell	Missing structural pressure hidden behind an acceptable equity row
8	Cross-check tier behaviour and open exposure against the deployment tables	Aggression drift and casual overrides going unrecorded
9	Record the verdict in the monthly review	A conclusion that exists only in memory and cannot be trended

Edge cases & failure modes

Where it can mislead

!A verdict recorded outside the closed vocabulary cannot be counted across months, so trends in verdicts disappear.
!Skipping step one produces a position that is precise, defensible, and computed from an incomplete ledger.

Doctrine

Connected inside MARS

This module doesn't work alone.

Connected — 01

Equity Percentiles (full page)

Open system page →

Connected — 02

Reading the Bands

Open system page →

Go deeper

Operator briefs on this territory.

Deep dive — 01

A fixed protocol for reading percentile charts.

Five steps, fixed order: verify the ruler, locate, contextualize with survival, check persistence, respond by doctrine.

Read the full brief →

Deep dive — 02

Two placements, four rooms, four different months.

Above median bought with adverse drawdown is not the same month as above median bought cleanly.

Read the full brief →

Deep dive — 03

Each band position permits a specific action, and most permit none.

Sustained P75-plus with clean metrics is the only read that opens an expansion conversation.

Read the full brief →

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