Measurement methodology
How the Desk Discipline suite measures
The per-instrument battery for Desk Discipline, the receipts each measurement will carry, and the honest state of what is published today. Looking for what you can buy in this family instead? That is the Desk Discipline suite hub.
What this suite measures, and why
The Desk Discipline suite measures the operational envelope of a live trading desk: distance to the rules that end accounts, the behaviour of the current book under replayed historical shocks, and whether the execution path itself leaks time and money by more than noise can explain.
Accounts are ended by arithmetic and structure at least as often as by bad ideas — a daily-loss limit crossed by one oversized position, a correlated cluster held as if it were five separate risks, fills that are systematically worse than quotes. This suite instruments those failure modes directly, and has no opinion about anyone’s entries.
The measurement battery, per instrument
Each instrument’s battery is summarized from its own published specification. Every dimension follows the six-stage lifecycle defined on the methodology page — pre-registered, content-hashed, deterministic, and shipped with its can-fail proof. Written in the future tense because nothing has been measured yet.
Measurement of structural latency disadvantage in an execution path — whether fills are worse than quotes by more than noise can explain.
- Quote-to-fill drift as a signed distribution
- Adverse-selection signatures, conditioned on order type, session, and size
- Rejection and requote clustering
Honest limit: It will not name a culprit. Measured disadvantage has innocent explanations — routing, session load, the subscriber’s own infrastructure — and the instrument enumerates them beside every finding.
Full instrument page →
Risk instrumentation against the actual rules of a prop-firm evaluation — the arithmetic boundary that ends accounts before the market does.
- Live halt distance to every account-ending rule, in units of adverse movement at current sizing
- Correlation-adjusted effective exposure across the book
- Risk-of-ruin surfaces, recomputed as the account moves, with assumptions visible
- Sizing grids precomputed under the evaluation’s rules
Honest limit: It has no opinion on entries or strategy. It polices the boundary between the strategy and the rules the evaluee agreed to.
Full instrument page →
Historical shock replay against the current book: what named events — the SNB floor break, COVID, carry unwinds, the gilts episode — would do to today’s positions.
- Scenario replay of recorded historical shocks against current positions
- Gap-through and vacuum-fill honesty — no assumed fills through empty books
- Ruin flags where a scenario ends the account
Honest limit: It replays recorded history. It does not forecast the next shock, and a book that survives every replay is not thereby safe.
Full instrument page →
The receipts this suite will publish
Every measurement from the Desk Discipline suite carries the same receipt chain, as defined in the full receipt taxonomy. Four of the six receipt types apply from the first measurement onward:
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Pre-registration
Each instrument’s battery is written and content-hashed before its first data collection. Any post-hoc change to the methodology would change the hash, and would be visible.
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Content hash
Data, code, and results are SHA-256 hashed, so a published result from this suite is recomputable: declared outputs from declared computation on declared inputs.
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Can-fail proof
Every test in the battery ships with a demonstration that it could have failed — a known defect injected and detected. A test that cannot fail proves nothing.
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Kill entries
Hypotheses registered for this suite and killed by the data are published with the same visibility as registrations. No silent disappearances.
What is published today
MEASUREMENTS PUBLISHED: NOT YET PUBLISHED
Nothing. No measurement from the Desk Discipline suite has been published, and this page will say so until one has. That order of operations is deliberate: pre-registration means the methodology is public before the data exists, so no result from this suite can ever have shaped the method that produced it.
When the measurement pipeline goes live, this page links, per instrument: the registered methodology document and its hash, point-in-time data manifests, battery results with confidence intervals and honest nulls, the can-fail proof beside every test, and kill entries for whatever does not survive.