Define what you look for in a trade, give each factor points out of 100, and mark the ones that are non-negotiable. Then grade any live setup against it. A missing must-have means no trade — no matter the score.
Your scorecard
0 / 100 pts
Confluence — what you look forPointsMust-have
Points allocated0 / 100
Aim for 5–8 factors and make your points add up to exactly 100. Put most of the points into your must-haves — the core conditions your edge depends on — and spread the rest across bonuses. The score you'll see when grading is the raw points ticked, out of 100.
How to hand out your points
a quick guide
The point value of each factor should answer one question: how much does this make the trade more likely to work? Here's a simple way to decide.
1
Start from your winners. Pull your best past trades and note what they had in common. The factors that show up in nearly all of them are your heavy hitters — they get the most points. The ones that show up sometimes get fewer.
2
Give must-haves the bulk. Your must-haves are the reason your strategy works at all, so together they should carry the majority of the 100 — roughly 60. Split that by importance: the single most important condition might be worth 20–25 on its own.
3
Bonuses split the rest. The remaining ~40 goes across your bonus factors. A strong bonus that genuinely tilts the odds might be 10–15; a minor "nice to have" 5 or less. If a factor barely changes the outcome, it barely earns points.
4
Rank first, fine-tune later. Don't agonise over exact numbers. Get the order right — which factors matter most to least — then adjust the values after you've graded 20 past trades and seen whether your high scores were actually your winners.
The exact numbers matter less than the ranking. If your A+ trades in testing weren't clearly better than your B trades, a factor is weighted wrong — move points from what didn't predict wins to what did.
Grade rubric
points · must-haves · confluences
A setup earns a grade only when it clears all three columns for that row. Its final grade is the highest row it fully satisfies — so the weakest of the three always decides.
Must-have columns auto-fill to sensible defaults from how many must-haves you mark above. A+ wants all of them; A allows one missing; B allows more than half present. Adjust any cell to taste.