Compose it once. Live by it.
The method is what Praxis scores you against. You do not write rules from scratch — you compose a playbook from a template, commit it, and the evening review enforces its rules. The whole thing is only as honest as those rules are answerable.
The method, your playbook, and rules
Three words do the work. The method ships in the app as a template — in v1 there is one, the IFVG liquidity-sweep reversal. It defines a fixed core you cannot edit, a set of bounded settings (the choices that are yours to make), and the gradeable rules the method implies. Your playbook is your committed instance of that template: your settings and your limits, scoped to one account. A rule is one promise the playbook makes — answered yes, no, or n/a — and the rules are what your execution score reads.
You compose, you don't author
At Playbook (in the sidebar) you open the composer at /playbook and make your choices: which instruments, the session window, stop method, profit style, whether you chase, how you treat SMT, your gap band, and which direction(s) you trade. Each choice turns rules on or off — commit a session window and an "in-window" rule applies; commit a single direction (long or short) and trading the other side counts against you; choose "no chase" and chasing an unconfirmed move counts against you. You are not writing free text; you are selecting from a menu the method already defines, so every rule stays objective and gradeable.
The five-second test still holds
Because rules are defined by the template, they already pass the test the old rule book demanded: each one is answerable — yes, no, or n/a — in about five seconds. Most are answered for you. When you log an entry, the per-entry rules are derived objectively from what you did — did you wait for the close, did the stop hold, did you add — so the score reflects the entry, not a tired person's nightly guess. The only rules you answer by hand are the day-level checks in the review.
Critical rules
Some rules are Critical. A Critical rule is one whose breach can end an account, yours or the firm's: averaging into losers past a stop, trading through a daily loss limit, refusing a first stop. Critical rules carry the score floor: any Critical "no" fails the day outright. That is severe by design — and it is why the Critical set is small. The Standard rules cost points when missed but do not floor you.
What Praxis refuses
Two kinds of promise are deliberately kept out of the method:
- Outcome-contaminated rules. "Make $500 a day" or "win 60% of trades" score the market's behavior, not yours. You cannot keep a promise the market gets a vote on — which is why P&L is captured but quarantined, never scored.
- Market-doctrine rules. The method's core is fixed in the template, but Praxis still scores whether you followed your committed playbook, not whether the method is right. Edge is not this app's business.
And one kind of breach deliberately is not policed: omission. Praxis does not punish the trade you failed to take. Hesitation is a real cost, but a missed trade is an edge problem, and edge is not this app's business.
The lock
Your first commit is immediate — you compose, you commit, and the playbook is live now. After that, the playbook is locked. You cannot edit it in place, and you cannot renegotiate it mid-session. To change it you amend: the new playbook takes effect at the next session open (6pm ET) and never less than a day out, and the playbook you committed keeps scoring until then. The single most dangerous edit — widening the box while it is hurting you — is made impossible by construction. Mirror the nightly-lock mental model: you set the day's box before the session, not while it is live.