The desk decides what’s worth your size.

• 01the watchlist problem

  Too many tickers, too little signal.

  Most retail tools surface every chart with a hammer pattern and call it a setup. Real desks scan thousands of names, then publish a shortlist. We replicate the shortlist — the Nexural Swing Desk filters 400+ candidates a session into seven that actually pass.

  98.3%filtered out
• 02the regime problem

  Setups don't work in every regime.

  A demand-zone bounce is gold in trend·long, garbage in regime·shift. Without a regime gate, you take the same playbook into every tape and wonder why your hit rate decays. The desk flips state with the market — long candidates literally stop printing when the HMM trips.

  6regime states
• 03the conviction problem

  Knowing what's good isn't sizing what's good.

  When five names look identical, traders pick at random. The desk ranks them by composite-z — a single number combining regime fit, setup quality, location, and risk — so you know which one deserves full size and which one deserves a starter.

  1rankable score

• It's not a signal service.

  We do not push you trades. The desk ranks; you decide. There is no chat-room "BTO AAPL at 232.40" message.

• It's not auto-execution.

  No order routing. No broker integration that fires fills on your behalf. Sizing is a hint; pulling the trigger is yours.

• It's not a black box.

  The composite-z weights are public, the regime model is documented, and the gauntlet (DSR · PBO · WFE · SPA) runs on every release.

• It's not institutional-grade indicators with marketing copy.

  It's a single ranking pipeline. The institutional-grade indicators feed it — they aren't the product, they're the inputs.

• It's not a guarantee.

  Past performance does not predict the future. The desk reduces noise. It cannot protect you from a bad regime call or your own sizing.

export function compositeZ(c: Components): number {
  const z =
    0.30 * c.regimeFit       +
    0.25 * c.setupQuality   +
    0.20 * c.location       +
    0.15 * c.riskClarity    +
    0.10 * c.edgePersistence;
  return zNormalize(z, "per-symbol-5y");
}

{
  "state":       "trend·long",
  "confidence":  0.83,
  "duration_min":182,
  "transitions": [
    { from: "rotation",
      to:   "trend·long",
      at:   "06:18:00Z" }
  ]
}

$ gauntlet glossary · DSR (deflated Sharpe ratio) · PBO (probability of backtest overfitting) · WFE (walk-forward efficiency) · SPA (superior predictive ability, Hansen 2005). Same family of overfit-resistance tests institutional desks run before deploying a strategy.

• How is composite-z different from a typical signal score?
  Most retail scoring stacks one indicator on top of another and normalizes at the end. Composite-z is a weighted sum of five z-normalized components — regime fit, setup quality, location, risk clarity, and edge persistence — refit quarterly on out-of-sample data. The weights and the refit history are published in the changelog.
• What does the desk trade — stocks, ETFs, both?
  Stocks. The candidate universe is the liquid US equity tape — large- and mid-cap names with enough volume to run the regime gate and composite-z components cleanly. Liquid sector ETFs (SPY, QQQ, XLK, etc.) are included as regime anchors but not surfaced as standalone setups. No futures, no options, no crypto.
• How often does the desk update?
  The ranked board ticks every five seconds on the production tier. The regime classifier re-evaluates each minute. Composite-z weights are re-fit quarterly; refits ship behind a feature flag and are announced on the changelog.
• Can I tune the weights to my style?
  Yes — the production weights are the default, but Pro and Automation accounts can clone the formula and override any component weight. Cloned formulas run alongside the default so you see both rankings side by side.
• What happens when the regime model is wrong?
  Regimes mis-classify; that’s why we publish the transition log. When the live regime is mid-flip, the desk widens its score thresholds and biases toward ‘watch’ over ‘long’ or ‘short’. You won’t see a full long set in regime·shift even if the prior state was trend·long.
• Does the desk auto-trade?
  No. There is no broker integration that fires orders for you. The desk produces ranked candidates with a recommended side and a starter size; you place the trade. This is intentional — see the anti-pitch.
• Is the gauntlet (DSR / PBO / WFE / SPA) the same one institutions use?
  Yes. It’s the same family of overfit-resistance tests institutional desks run before deploying a strategy. We publish the gauntlet result on every released indicator and on the composite formula itself, so you can audit whether what shipped held up out of sample.
• What if I’m new to swing trading?
  Start in the academy and on the playbooks page first. The desk is most useful when you already understand the setups it surfaces — otherwise the score just becomes a number you trust without context.