Operator's Manual

The essence

Most of a stock's daily move is just the market. TradeMath subtracts it. What is left — the part a name did on its own — is scored 0 to 100 as Alpha (50 = neutral), for 150 large-cap names, every day, walk-forward, with no hindsight. Every screen on the desk is a view of that score, its history, or the difference between two names.

Prices tell you what happened. Alpha tells you who was being bought or sold harder than the market explains, how fresh that is, and how far it has already run.

The desk turns that into trades: a short list of fully specified positions the engine has already qualified — entry, hedge, exit, size — each with one tested number beside it, the average outcome of that shape in this kind of market at that exit, replayed since 2019. Shapes that test negative in the current market are not offered. That list is the front door; everything else on the desk is the work behind it.

Where the edge comes from

You see relative strength before it shows up in price. A name that keeps beating its market-implied move is being accumulated; one that keeps missing it is being distributed. Price can look ordinary while that is happening. Alpha rising through 60 marks a fresh strength run; the ticket says whether the move is early (Fair, Discount) or already stretched (Extended, Very Extended).

You can own the difference and not the market. A hedge pair — leader long, laggard short, same sector, both legs sized to equal daily risk — cancels the market out. Bull, bear or chop, you are paid on the gap between two names, which is the thing TradeMath actually measures.

You know what kind of market you are in. The tape reads the market into one of four states and tells you, in words, how the reads behave there — trending tapes chase strength, grinding bears reward the discount, dislocations are where hedges earn their keep.

And the rules are tested, not asserted. Every green cutout in this manual is a replay against history: hedge pairs pay in a window of roughly day 10 to 21 and get out on a three-day Narrowing run; a bullish directional call gets out when Alpha closes back under 60; both held across 20 years of very different markets. The coarse windows are published; the selection rules stay inside the engine.

Your first two weeks, step by step

1. Read the rail first. Under the header: the tape, the breadth regime, the market's own Alpha. That is your posture for the day — full size in a trending tape, hedged in a grind or a dislocation. Ten seconds.

   

2. Open Trades. Ten at most, ranked by their tested number. Read a line left to right — trade, hedge, tested, exit, size — then open one: the run, the run clock, the outcome distribution, and why it qualified. How to read a trade line.
3. Then Today's edge, on the Market tab. Three strongest longs, three weakest shorts, three best-qualified hedge pairs — the wider board the trades were drawn from. Click one.

   

4. Check two things on the ticket. The Alpha number with its three dials (Edge, Conviction, Sector rank), and the Extension line in Context. Strong and Fair is the setup; strong and Very Extended is late — in a trending tape that can still be chased, in a grind it should be left alone.
5. Track it — don't trade it yet. Press + Track on two or three trades, and Track outlook on a name you are curious about. Tracking freezes the read so you can grade it later; nothing is bought or sold.

   

6. Watch the chips, not the prices. Each morning the tracker tells you what changed: paying, losing, thesis flipped, tested exit fired, earnings tomorrow. The chart tints the background from the day you tracked — green, red or amber — so the verdict is visible without arithmetic.

   

7. Learn the two exits. Directional: Alpha closes under 60 — the ticket and the chart mark it. Pair: a three-day Narrowing run, or the gap converging — the lane says so. Both are tested; both beat holding to a calendar date.
8. Grade yourself against the house. Close a trade when its exit fires and it moves to Done with the result frozen. Your book sits beside the house book — the desk trading its own list by its own rules, after costs. If the house runs ahead of you, you are overriding the rules; if you run ahead of it, your selection is adding something. Either way you have lost nothing but two weeks of looking.
9. When you do trade, size from the desk. The spread lane header gives the ratio — $1 long : $x short — and the net β lean so you know how much market you still own. Directional names carry a Movement fingerprint so a 30-point Alpha isn't mistaken for a 30% move.

Replay the 60-second tour ↗ to see the stops on the desk itself.

What TradeMath is not

It is not a price target, a forecast of the index, or a signal service that tells you to buy at 9:31. It doesn't know about a name's news, only how the market has been treating it. It measures; you decide. Nothing here is investment advice.

Words you'll see

Alpha — the score, 0–100, 50 neutral. Above 60 and rising is a strength run; below 40 the mirror. True strength — the relative strength chart: the line that adds up a name's market-adjusted moves, what it did on its own with the market stripped out. The tape — Trending, Flat, Grinding bear, or Dislocation; the kind of market you're in. Extension — how far a name has already run vs its own norm (Fair, Extended, Very Extended, Discount). Spread — a hedge pair's long minus short, the thing you actually own. Δ (delta) — a pair's Alpha gap, long minus short; wide and widening is the setup, converging is the exit. Tested — a green cutout in this manual means we replayed it against history and it held.

Where to go next

To read the front door: Trades — the front door. To understand the number: Alpha & the Score Strip, then True strength — the chart and Reading the Context Panel. To trade it: Hedge Pairs & the Spread Lane and Tracking. To know what kind of market you're in: Reading the tape. For the market as a whole: Market Internals & the Alpha Board and Signal Events.