A weekly cap is a number you write on Sunday, or on the evening before you will next study. It is the sum you are willing to lose across every idea that week, not per chart. When the running total reaches it, the Intensive rule is plain: you stop adding new risk. You do not go hunting for a chart that will “make the week back.”

What usually happens instead

In May a learner on the Intensive, a clerk who follows two bank shares after work, arrived for evening three with three losses already logged. The losses were small individually and together they had passed the cap she wrote on evening one. She had a fourth chart in the folder, cleaner than the first three, and she wanted to discuss the entry. Nalin closed the folder and asked her to read the cap aloud. The fourth chart stayed in the folder.

That felt rude to her, and she said so. The chart was, in her words, the best of the month. The point of the cap is that it does not grade charts. It only knows the number. If the cap can be set aside because a pattern looks especially neat, it was never a cap. It was a sentence you liked on a quiet Sunday.

What we rewrite

The rewrite has to be checkable on paper. A vague wish to behave better does not give the next week anything to count. On the sheet she changed three lines. The cap for the following week was written smaller, because the original number had been a guess about her salary rather than about the distances on her charts. The setups allowed next week were cut from “anything with a clear level” to the single pattern she can describe in one sentence. And the size on any new idea was capped at half until she had one week that did not touch the limit.

None of that repairs the three losses. It stops the fourth from being a mood. If you want this read against your own log, bring the log to a Desk Review. Leave the inspiring chart at home until the cap has been read out loud.

Back to field notes · See the courses