What TIP measures
Your cognitive abilities (drawn from the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model), your behavioral routing under decision pressure (drawn from prospect theory, dual-process theory, somatic-markers research, and hot/cold gap research), and your emotional regulation patterns across eight categories (drawn from the most replicated emotion-regulation findings in the literature). Twenty-one constructs across four dimensions. Eighty-nine items: 83 core, 3 attention checks, 3 cognitive reflection items.
What TIP does not measure
Your trading system, your P&L, your capital base, your market access, your personality in the broad five-factor sense beyond the trait layer that intersects with trader-relevant constructs. The framework is trader-specific.
What TIP does not claim
That the assessment will improve your P&L, that any specific trade or trading style is right or wrong for you, that the report substitutes for trading reps, that the framework guarantees outcomes. The framework names the wiring and the failure modes. You still trade the trades.
What the assessment is
A research-grounded read of your cognitive profile applied to the trading context, with practice protocols, hygiene routines, development priorities, and style-fit reasoning that follow from the read.
How one answer becomes a score
Every number in the report traces back to specific items by a fixed arithmetic path. There is no weighting you cannot see and no interpretation layer between your answers and your scores.
Step 1, the item. Each statement is answered on a five-point scale, 1 for strongly disagree through 5 for strongly agree.
Step 2, reverse keying. Some items are written so that agreement indicates the opposite of the trait. Those are flipped with 6 minus your answer before anything is summed, so a 5 becomes a 1. Reverse keying exists to correct direction, so that agreeing with a negatively worded statement lowers the score instead of raising it. It is not the straight-lining check; that job belongs to the attention checks and consistency pairs in step six. Pattern Recognition, for example, draws on seven items, two of which are reverse keyed.
Step 3, the subscale. The corrected values for that subscale are averaged, then the average is placed on a 0 to 100 scale with (mean minus 1) divided by 4, times 100. A mean of 1 is 0. A mean of 5 is 100. A mean of 3, the exact middle, is 50. Unanswered items are skipped rather than counted as zero, which is why the free 18-item read produces real scores on a subset of the same scales rather than deflated ones.
Step 4, the dimension. Subscales group into four dimensions: six cognitive abilities, four behavioral risk axes, eight emotional regulation categories, and three personality traits. Twenty-one constructs in total.
Step 5, the routing. Your two highest cognitive abilities and your dominant behavioral axis form a triple, and that triple maps to one of nineteen archetypes through the fixed table described below. The disposition effect is scored and reported but deliberately excluded from routing, so it can be read as a finding rather than as something that quietly moved your designation.
Step 6, validity. Three attention checks are placed at roughly the twenty, fifty and eighty percent marks and ask for a specific response. Three consistency pairs check whether two items measuring the same construct were answered compatibly. The flags they raise set the validity tier printed on your file, which tells you how much weight the exact numbers can carry.
How the personalized outputs are computed
The report's personalization layers are deterministic functions of your assessment data. No hidden weights, no LLM interpretation, no engagement-driven adjustment.
Archetype assignment: your top-1 cognitive ability, top-2 cognitive ability, and dominant behavioral routing axis form a triple. That triple maps to one of nineteen named archetypes via a fixed lookup table. If the exact triple is not in the canonical map, the engine falls back to the top-1 ability's default archetype.
Affinity breakdown: for each of the nineteen archetypes, a score is computed from your data on that archetype's defining (top-1, top-2, axis) plus a bonus when your own top abilities match the archetype's defining pair. The top three archetypes by score are normalized to sum to one hundred percent. The proportions reflect how closely your wiring fits each archetype's pattern, not a popularity vote or peer comparison.
Profile clarity: the gap between your top-1 and top-2 cognitive ability scores classifies the read. Gap of fifteen or more is high clarity (your primary is sharply dominant); eight to fourteen is moderate (clear primary with notable secondaries); below eight is low (a flat profile where multiple archetypes are similarly close). The clarity badge is the framework being honest about its own confidence in the assignment.
Atypical-variant detection: if your actual dominant routing axis does not match your assigned archetype's canonical axis, a callout names this explicitly. Most archetypes have one canonical routing axis (e.g. Pattern Hunters are usually patience-routed); the callout surfaces when you are the less-common variant.
D3 leak inflection and strength peak: the leak-naming sentence selects the lowest-scoring of your eight emotional-regulation categories. The strength-peak callout selects the highest-scoring. Both inject your actual numeric score into archetype-specific prose.
Score injection: wherever an ability or axis score appears inside the report prose (as opposed to in a data box), the template fills your actual computed score at render time. No defaults are substituted silently; if a value is missing, a placeholder is rendered explicitly.
You get the map. You still take the trade.