What TIP is for
Self-reflection and structured practice. You read how your own answers describe your habits, check those descriptions against your own records, and pick one or two things to practice. TIP is not built for hiring or screening traders, for clinical use, or for deciding whether someone should trade.
How TIP collects answers
Eighty-nine items, of three kinds. Eighty-three are statements you rate from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). They feed the twenty-one scored scales. TIP does not test these abilities. It scores how you describe them. (Exception: the three reasoning problems are a short performance task, Frederick 2005.)
Three items are those reasoning problems, the Cognitive Reflection Test, used as published. You type a number, it is marked right or wrong, and the result (0 to 3) is stored with your record. It is not printed in the report and does not feed the archetype or any practice. Three more items are attention checks that ask for a specific answer. The intake questions at the start, such as how long you have traded, give context and are not scored.
What TIP measures
Cognitive Abilities, six scales of seven items: Pattern Recognition, Chart Vision, Working Memory, Decision Speed, Risk & Sizing Math, Market Knowledge. Organized using the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model. Higher means you describe the ability as stronger.
Behavioral Risk, four axes of four items: Conviction, Patience, Discipline, Disposition Effect. For the first three, higher means more of the named behavior as you describe it. Disposition Effect reads the other way from its label: a higher score means you reported fewer disposition-effect tendencies (cutting winners early, holding losers).
Emotional Regulation, eight scales of two items: Drawdown Resilience, Profit-Holding Composure, FOMO Resistance, Impulse Inhibition, Recovery Speed, Frustration Tolerance, Tilt Resistance, Patience Under Boredom. Higher means steadier regulation as you describe it. These are trading situations informed by emotion-regulation research such as Gross (2015), not the regulation strategies that research names. With two items each, they are the least precise scales in TIP.
Personality, three baselines of three items: Discipline (Conscientiousness), Exploration (Openness), Stress Response (Neuroticism). Higher means more of the trait, so for Stress Response higher means more stress reactivity. The items are TIP's own, inspired by Big Five domains, not items from a published inventory.
What TIP does not measure
Your trading system, your P&L, your capital base, your market access, your brain activity, or your personality in the full five-factor sense. TIP does not see your trades. Every score except the reasoning problems comes from how you describe yourself.
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, or that the framework guarantees outcomes. The report offers hypotheses about your habits and names the failure points worth checking. You still trade the trades.
What the assessment is
A structured self-description, organized by published research and applied to trading, with practice suggestions, hygiene routines and development priorities that follow from your answers. The style-fit section is a TIP heuristic built from two or three of your ability scores. It is not a suitability score or a success probability.
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 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 averaged, so a 5 becomes a 1. Reverse keying corrects direction. It is not the straight-lining check; that job belongs to the response-quality items in step six. Pattern Recognition, for example, draws on seven items, two of which are reverse keyed.
Step 3, the scale. The corrected answers for that scale are averaged, then placed on a 0 to 100 range with (mean minus 1) divided by 4, times 100. A mean of 1 is 0, 3 is 50, 4 is 75, 5 is 100. Each score is the average of your answers for that scale, rescaled to 0–100 (an average answer of 4 on the 1–5 scale shows as 75). It is not a percentile and does not compare you with other traders. The bands (High 70 or more, Mid 40 to 69, Low under 40) are TIP's reading guide, not validated cut-offs.
Missing answers. Unanswered items are skipped, not counted as zero. A scale with no answers at all shows as not available rather than 0. TIP has not yet approved a minimum-coverage rule, so a scale with one answered item is scored the same way as a complete one. Read partial scales, including those in the free 18-item read, with that in mind.
Step 4, the dimension. Scales group into four dimensions: six cognitive abilities, four behavioral risk axes, eight emotional regulation scales and three personality baselines. Twenty-one constructs in total.
Step 5, the routing. Your scores pick one of nineteen archetypes through the fixed rule described in the next block.
Step 6, response quality. Response quality: High | Moderate | Low. Response quality checks attention and consistency in this sitting (three attention items and three pairs of matching questions). It does not tell you whether the assessment itself is valid. TIP's instrument has not yet been validated. Each missed attention item counts as one flag, and so does each matching pair whose answers sit more than 2 points apart once reversed. Zero flags reads High, one or two Moderate, three or more Low. These are TIP product thresholds, not established cut-offs. When quality reads Low, the report says so and treats its interpretation as provisional.
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 two highest cognitive ability scores and the highest of Conviction, Patience and Discipline form a triple. Disposition Effect is scored and reported but never routes, so it reads as a finding rather than something that quietly moved your label. The triple is looked up in a fixed table in this order: the exact triple; the same two abilities in reverse order with the same axis; the two abilities in either order, ignoring the axis; the default archetype for your top ability; and, if nothing else matches, The Adaptive Trader.
Ties: when two scores are equal, the tie resolves by a fixed order, not at random. For abilities: Pattern Recognition, Chart Vision, Working Memory, Decision Speed, Risk & Sizing Math, Market Knowledge. For the behavioral axis: Conviction, Patience, Discipline. The name earlier in the list wins. The order is a convention, not a judgment that one ability matters more.
Scores and bands: every scale is reported from 0 to 100, a position on your own answers, not a comparison with other traders. Bands follow the same cut-offs everywhere, on the site and in the report: High is 70 or more, Mid is 40 to 69, Low is under 40.
Nearest archetypes: each archetype gets a weighted similarity score from your scores on its defining abilities and axis (first ability weighted one and a half times, second ability once, axis seven tenths), plus a bonus when your top abilities match its defining pair. The report names the two archetypes with the highest similarity after your own, with what each shares with your pattern. No percentages are shown: similarity is a ranking, not a probability, and it does not predict which label a retake would give.
Label separation: the deciding gap is the smaller of two gaps: between your second and third abilities, and between your top two routing axes. Under 5 points is Close, 5 to 9 is Fair, 10 or more is Clear. When the label is Close, the report names the alternatives and asks you to read them as real possibilities. Separation says how clearly the label was decided, not how accurate the result is.
Atypical-variant detection: if your dominant behavioral axis does not match your assigned archetype's usual axis, a callout names this explicitly. Most archetypes have one usual axis (Pattern Hunters, for example, are usually patience-routed); the callout surfaces when you are the less common variant.
What to check first: one candidate pattern comes from your archetype description; the others come from your own lowest emotional-regulation scores. Each arrives with a check you run on your own recent sessions, and none is treated as a finding until your record says so.
Score injection: wherever a score appears inside the report prose, the template fills your actual computed score at render time. No defaults are substituted silently; if a value is missing, the report is not generated rather than printed with a gap.
Where the recommendations come from
Your 7 trading rules, the exercises, the hygiene routines and the 90-day roadmap are TIP-designed practices informed by the research on this page. They are not treatments taken from those studies. Exact durations, counts and thresholds in them (a 25-minute block, a number of breathing cycles, a pause length) are example numbers chosen as starting points, not research findings. Adjust them to fit your sessions.
Where validation stands
Validation of these adaptations has not yet been established. TIP has no reliability, factor-structure, retest, norm or predictive validation evidence yet. In plain terms: we cannot yet say how consistent your scores would be on a retake, whether the items group into the scales as designed, how your scores compare with other traders, or whether any score predicts trading results. This page will change when that evidence exists.
Limitations
Self-report. Answers show how you see yourself, which can differ from how you trade, especially under live risk.
Short scales. Each emotional-regulation scale has two items, so a single answer can move it by up to 50 points.
One sitting. Mood, fatigue and recent results can shift answers on the day.
No norms. Scores do not compare you with anyone.
Research transfer. Most of the research cited here was not done with traders, and TIP's items are its own, so findings from those studies do not automatically apply to TIP's scores. The one direct study of trader personality on this page (Lo, Repin & Steenbarger, 2005) was small and found no trader personality profile.
Revision history
28 Sep 2026. Science remediation: corrected citations, removed unsupported neural and norm claims, renamed validity to response quality, documented scoring, routing and uncertainty rules.
20 Jul 2026. Added the scoring walkthrough and the Kuhl and Simons & Gaher sources.
19 Apr 2026. Assessment version 2.0 approved: 89 items, 21 scored constructs.
You get the map. You still take the trade.
