What the Norden Method Score reads

What the score is computed from, why it is not about money, and why a day you remember as good can read lower now.

What it is

One number from 0 to 100 for a sitting, read off how that sitting followed the method. 100 means every rule on target, nothing past its band and nothing held past the limit.

It is not a measure of your profit and loss, and it never was. It is a measure of the method.

What it reads

Two things, and nothing else.

The rules. Every finding the engine raised on that sitting, at the weight that rule carries. The conduct stops are the heaviest, because crossing a limit you set yourself is the hardest failure the method knows, and clean scalps afterwards cannot buy it back.

The size of the error. Not only that a trade went wrong, but how far. For a losing trade that is the worse of the heat it took against you and the loss it actually realised, measured per lot. For a trade that came out flat or better it is the heat it took, discounted, because the market gave it back.

Everything is per lot, so the score reads geometry rather than dollars. Two traders making the same mistake at one lot and at ten lots get the same reading of the mistake.

Why a day you remember as good can read lower

The scoring was rebuilt because the old one rewarded losing, and that is not a figure of speech. Measured across every stored session, a one trade day that lost a small amount read 100, a one trade day that lost four times as much on a wide excursion read 80, and a heavy day that made money with small errors read 0.

Three mechanics did it: a short day was almost immune because of a grace trade in the arithmetic, the score could not see a tick and so could not tell four ticks against from two hundred, and the penalty was charged per flagged trade, which punished volume rather than error.

All three are gone. The day is now read from the worth of its own trades, so trading more can never cost you points by itself, and a bad trade cannot be padded out of the number by clean ones around it.

Every stored session was rescored on the new arithmetic, which is why a day you had already looked at can carry a different number now. The trades did not change. The ruler did.

The bands are per instrument

What counts as a small or a large excursion is not the same everywhere. The NQ and ES bands are the coach's own. The YM bands are ours and provisional, set between his two in the same order as the measured speed of each market, and they will be replaced the moment he gives his own.

On an instrument with no confirmed bands, only the rules can be judged, the size of the error cannot, and the day is marked as such and can never read 100. That is a declared limit rather than a low score.

When there is no score at all

If the trades behind a sitting are not available, the day reads not scored rather than showing a number computed without them. Scoring blind was measured and it reads high, always in the flattering direction, so a blank is the honest answer.

If a number does not make sense against what you remember of a day, open a ticket with a question about my numbers and name the date and the instrument. The whole finding list for that sitting can be walked through with you.