Educational resource. Not financial advice. Not affiliated with Robinhood Markets, Inc. Example parameters are calibrated defaults, not a performance guarantee.

Measurable thresholds

Turns the judgment terms in the playbook into tests a desk can actually run.

Markdown: https://www.soyhands.com/resources/thresholds.md
Machine-readable: https://www.soyhands.com/desk-rules.yaml
Calibrated: 2026-07-28 (defaults, not derived constants)

Read this first

The numbers below are starting points, not discovered constants. Nobody derived them from a private edge study published here. Publishing them as precise thresholds without calibration would be false precision, which is the same error as an unmeasurable rule wearing a hard label.

Use them this way:

Ship them as defaults so the rules become enforceable today.
Log the measured value in every Evidence entry, not just the pass or fail.
After thirty or so logged sessions, check whether the threshold actually separated good days from bad ones. Move it if it did not.
Say in the file that they are calibrated defaults and give the date of the last calibration.

A rule that is measurable and slightly wrong beats a rule that is unmeasurable and vaguely right. The first one can be fixed.

When there is no data

Default assumption: the assistant has no live market data. In that case it does not estimate, guess, or reason from memory about where anything is trading. It asks the trader for the specific number the test needs, and if the trader does not have it, the step fails and the desk sits. An unmeasured gate is a failed gate.

Also confirm current ET time and whether the market is open, closed, weekend, or holiday before evaluating any session window.

1. Regime check

Replaces: "Are SPY/QQQ friendly to this playbook today?"

Continuation playbooks need a market that is trending and holding. The test is whether both indexes are on the same side of two references and staying there.

Inputs needed: SPY and QQQ opening range high and low, VWAP, current price, count of VWAP crosses since the open.

Friendly for long continuation, all four required:

Both SPY and QQQ above the opening range high.
Both above VWAP.
Each has held above VWAP for at least 30 continuous minutes before the window opens.
Fewer than 5 VWAP crosses on SPY since the open.

Friendly for short continuation: the same four, mirrored.

Anything else is not friendly. Split indexes, one above and one below, is a sit. Mixed regime is the most expensive tape for continuation because it produces setups that look correct and fail anyway.

2. Chaotic tape

Replaces: "chaotic tape" in the hard sit list.

Chaotic is not the same as fast, and it is not the same as down. It means the tape has no persistent side, so structural stops carry no information.

Any one of these triggers the hard sit:

SPY opening range width is more than 1.5 times its 20 day average opening range width.
SPY has crossed VWAP 5 or more times since the open.
SPY ATR(14) on the 5 minute chart is in the top decile of its trailing 60 day range.
No side has held VWAP for 15 continuous minutes in the hour before the window.

Why these four. The first two catch range expansion and chop, which are different problems. The third catches days that are violent without being choppy. The fourth catches the specific failure of continuation reads, which is that price keeps reverting through the reference the plan is built on.

Note for sit logs: "roughly double the recent average" corresponds to test one (threshold 1.5×).

3. Soft tape

Replaces: "soft tape" in the Wheel skip list.

Different problem from chaotic. Soft means the willing to own assumption is under pressure, so a cash secured put is more likely to be assigned into a falling name.

Any one of these triggers the Wheel skip:

SPY below its 20 day moving average and its 50 day moving average.
SPY has closed lower on 3 of the last 5 sessions.
VIX above 25, or VIX up more than 20 percent over 5 sessions.
The underlying itself is below its 50 day moving average, regardless of the index.

The last one matters most. Index softness is a headwind. Softness in the name you are about to agree to own is the actual risk, because assignment is the base case, not the bad case.

See Wheel desk notes.

4. Fake risk to reward

Replaces: "fake R:R" in the hard sit list.

R:R is fake when the ratio was manufactured rather than measured. Three specific ways.

Test one, stop placement. The stop must sit at structure, meaning a level where the read is genuinely wrong. If the stop was chosen to make the ratio work, the ratio is fake. Practical check: if you moved the stop to the correct structural level, does the trade still clear the minimum? If not, it never did.

Test two, clean path. Draw the distance from entry to target. If a prior swing high, a shelf, a session high, or a round number sits inside that path, the target is not reachable without a fight and should be marked down to that level instead. Recompute.

Test three, ordering. The target must be identified from the chart before the entry price is chosen. A target picked after the entry is a justification, not a plan.

Minimum after all three: 2R, computed on the structural stop and the marked down target, and assuming you get filled at the worse end of the trigger rather than the wick.

5. Sweep versus mid-reclaim

Replaces: "buy the sweep not the mid-reclaim."

The distinction is whether liquidity was actually taken before the reclaim.

A sweep, all three required:

Price trades below a clear prior swing low by at least 0.25 times the 5 minute ATR. A one tick undercut is noise, not a sweep.
Price reclaims back above that swing low within 10 minutes.
Volume on the sweep bar is above the 20 bar average.

A mid-reclaim, which is the sit: price reclaims a level without having traded through liquidity beneath it, or reclaims from the middle of a range with untested lows still sitting below. Untested lows below the entry are the tell. They will get tested.

6. Maximum adverse excursion in sweeps

Replaces: "no MAE in liquidity sweeps."

The premise of a sweep entry is that the low is now defended. So the trade should not revisit it.

Rule: after entry on a sweep reclaim, price should not trade back below the sweep low at all. Any print below it means the low was not defended and the read is void.

Action: exit on the print, do not wait for the written stop. This is a read invalidation, which is faster than a price invalidation. The written stop stays in place underneath as the backstop for a gap through.

7. Notional band and sizing

Replaces: "inside the Agentic notional / risk band," which is currently referenced but never derived.

Sizing is arithmetic once three numbers are written down before the session. All three are percentages so nothing here needs a dollar figure, consistent with the sanitize rule.

Written before the session opens:

trading_capital: the amount allocated to this desk. Not net worth, not buying power.
risk_per_trade_pct: default 0.005 (one half of one percent of trading capital). This is 1R.
max_notional_pct: default 0.20 (20 percent of trading capital in any one position).
daily_stop_R: default 3R. Hit it and the desk is flat for the day.

These percentage fields are fractions of 1, not whole-number percents. 0.5 would mean 50 percent and is wrong for this desk.

Position size:

R              = trading_capital * risk_per_trade_pct
stop_distance  = |entry - structural_stop|
shares         = R / stop_distance
notional       = shares * entry

Example: trading_capital 10_000, risk_per_trade_pct 0.005 → R = 50.

Then both checks must pass:

notional <= trading_capital * max_notional_pct
If notional exceeds the cap, the position is cut to the cap. It is not resized by widening the stop. A wide stop that forces a notional breach means the setup is too loose for this desk, which is a sit.

Daily stop interacts with the state check. Hitting daily_stop_R is a hard sit for the rest of the session, and any request to trade after it is rule shopping, which is covered by the state check.

8. What counts as a real screen

Replaces: "real liquid screen, or hand-picking?"

A real screen, all four required:

Ran from written criteria that existed before the session.
Criteria include a liquidity floor, suggested default: average daily volume above 1 million shares and average spread under 0.1 percent of price.
The result set was not filtered by hand afterward to reach a preferred name.
An empty result is accepted as an answer.

That last one is the whole point. A screen you would override when it returns nothing was never a screen, it was a formality.

See the trading kit session checklist.

Disclaimer

Educational only. Not an offer to buy or sell securities. Past patterns are not future results. You are responsible for every order placed in your accounts. This site is not a broker-dealer and is not affiliated with Robinhood.

Measurable Thresholds