Reading your grade card
The grade card is the heart of your Edge Lab report. It takes 13 specific trading behaviors, grades each one with a letter, and splits them into the two halves of your trading: Edge and Psychology.
This is the part of the report that turns "my results are inconsistent" into "your risk control is a B but your tilt resistance is a D." Named behaviors, individually graded, so you know what to work on instead of guessing.
The two domains
- Edge covers the mechanics of your strategy — reading direction, entering in line with that read, capturing what the market offered, controlling risk, and repeating it.
- Psychology covers your execution under pressure — how you behave after a loss, how stable your size and frequency stay through a session, and how much the most recent trade colours the next one.
Each behavior gets its own letter, and each carries a one-line plain-English headline explaining what earned it.
The letter ladder
Grades run from A+ at the top down to F at the bottom, with the usual plus and minus steps in between:
A+ · A · A- · B+ · B · B- · C+ · C · C- · D+ · D · D- · F
Letters are the only unit you'll see. There's no grade-point number anywhere in Edge Lab — a letter means the same thing to everyone, and a decimal average of letters doesn't.
Colour follows the letter: A grades are green, B blue, C amber, D and F red. It's a fast way to scan the card without reading every row.
The behaviors we grade
These are the behaviors Edge Lab names today, five in each domain:
| Edge | What it looks at |
|---|---|
| Directional read | Whether your call on direction is right more than chance |
| Trade alignment | Whether the trades you take match the read you had |
| Profit capture | How much of the move you actually banked |
| Risk control | How well you sized and defended each position |
| Consistency | Whether the above repeats, or comes and goes |
| Psychology | What it looks at |
|---|---|
| Tilt resistance | How you trade in the minutes and hours after a loss |
| Revenge trading | Whether you go straight back at a market that just took money from you |
| Overtrading | Whether your trade count runs beyond what your setups justify |
| Session stability | Whether your size and frequency hold steady through a session |
| Recency bias | How heavily the last trade or two colours the next decision |
More behaviors unlock as Edge Lab sees more of your trading — a behavior you haven't seen yet simply hasn't been graded for you yet. Which brings us to the rule that matters most.
A blank is not an F
This is the single most important thing to understand about your grade card.
When a behavior has no letter next to it, that means Edge Lab has not yet seen enough of the relevant trading to grade it fairly. The on-screen legend says it plainly:
— not enough trades for OTIS to grade this axis yet (not a bad grade).
So, concretely:
- A blank is not a zero. It is not counted as an F, a D, or anything else.
- It does not drag your Edge Score or Psychology Score down. Unmeasured behaviors are skipped in the arithmetic, not scored as failures. A trader with two A grades and the rest still unmeasured stands at an A — not a D.
- It fills in on its own. Keep trading and the grade appears when there's enough behind it.
- When it appears, that's new information, not improvement. A behavior that goes from blank to a C hasn't "improved from F to C" — it had no grade to improve from. Edge Lab lists these separately as Newly measured rather than pretending you moved up the ladder.
If you take one thing from this collection, take this: an empty row is Edge Lab being honest about what it doesn't know yet, not a judgement on your trading.
Your biggest leak
Below the grade card, Edge Lab singles out one behavior as your biggest leak — the one habit costing you the most right now. The full report prices it in dollars and shows you what your results would have looked like without it.
That gets its own article: Your biggest leak.
Two different grading systems
Further down the report you'll find trades graded A, B, C or D. Those are a different system, and confusing the two is the most common mistake people make with this report:
- The A+ to F grades on this page score a behavior, across all your trading.
- The A to D grades further down score an individual trade, on how well it was executed.
The app says so on the card itself: "These grades score individual trades on how well they were executed — they're not the same as the A–F axis grades above." See What your trades were worth.
Where to go next
- Your report card, week by week — watching these grades move over time.
- Your biggest leak — the one to fix first.
- What your trades were worth — the other grading system, explained.
- Your Edge Score and Psychology Score — how these letters roll up into the two headline numbers.