Equity Percentiles · Reading the Bands

The columns beside the bands.

Bands published

P5–P95

Reporting views

Target cap

$100,000

How MARS uses this

This page is the location question — where in the envelope are you? — and the overlay is the instrument that answers it. The read is positional first: median tracking is the system behaving as modeled, P75 with controlled drawdown is strength, P90 is quarantined from expectations by rule.

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.

The location instrument: live equity placed inside its own percentile envelope, read by position before emotion.

Three horizons, one table

Month, quarter, and full year are separate rulers.

The distribution is published by month, by quarter, and for the full horizon, and the three are not interchangeable. A month sitting at P60 inside a quarter tracking at P30 is a different system than a month at P60 inside a quarter at P70. Reading the shorter horizon alone is how a recovering quarter gets mistaken for a healthy one, and reading only the longer horizon is how a quarter that turned four weeks ago stays invisible until the next one.

The cap artifact

A flat P95 band is the target, not a bug.

Successful paths stop at completion, so equity values are capped at the target once reached. High percentiles therefore compress toward the cap rather than continuing to fan out, and the visual flattening at the top of the envelope is structural. The QA checklist calls this out specifically before any comparison, because an operator who reads the flat top as a modelled ceiling on their own account has drawn a conclusion the model never made.

Locked paths

Locked paths are still in the denominator.

A path that breaches the lock threshold stops trading and never counts as a completion, but it does not vanish from the distribution. That is the point. Completion probability is survival-adjusted by construction, which is why the completion figure and the lock figure are always cited together, and why a system that looks fast on the equity fan can still be carrying meaningful lock probability underneath it.

Locked paths must not be read as active paths that simply performed poorly.
Completion probability with the lock rate omitted is not a survival statement.
The lock rate is the reason gate-aware contraction and smart exposure rules exist at all.

Position is not trajectory

Where you sit matters less than where you are heading.

One band position is a data point. A sequence of them is a story. A system holding steadily at P40 and a system sliding from P60 to P40 occupy the same row this month while deserving opposite responses next month, and only the review history distinguishes them. This is why band position is recorded at review cadence rather than watched continuously: the envelope is a ruler, and a ruler read every hour measures the reader's nerves rather than the account.

Reference

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.

Reference

The equity distribution table, column by column

Column	What it reports	Why it changes the read
Median	The centerline of the whole distribution	The expected position, not the promised one
Mean	The arithmetic average across paths	Diverges from median when tails are heavy, which is itself a signal
P5 / P10	Adverse floor	Live equity here demands diagnosis, not panic
P25	Lower normal bound	Below median but inside variance; check execution and fees
P75 / P90	Outperformance zone	Confirm it was structurally earned before treating it as edge
P95	Upper band	Often flattens near the cap because paths stop at target completion
% above start	Share of paths still above starting equity	Separates growth from mere survival
% above prior period	Share improving period over period	Distinguishes a rising distribution from a wide one
% already hit target	Share completed	Removes completed paths from the live comparison population
% locked	Share past the lock threshold	The survival context every other column sits inside

Doctrine

Connected inside MARS

This module doesn't work alone.

Connected — 01

Equity Percentiles (full page)

Open system page →

Connected — 02

The 3-Step Protocol

Open system page →

Go deeper

Operator briefs on this territory.

Deep dive — 01

P5 to P95: what the equity fan actually represents.

The bands are weekly rankings, not routes — and the P95 flattening at the top is the target cap, not a ceiling on ambition.

Read the full brief →

Deep dive — 02

Movement between bands is a story. Drawing the line forward is a mistake.

Sitting at P40 is information. Sliding to P40 is a story. Neither is a forecast.

Read the full brief →

Deep dive — 03

The equity table carries four numbers the fan chart cannot show.

Above start, above prior period, already completed, locked — the population shares a fan chart hides.

Read the full brief →

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