The three axes we measure — Confidence, Discipline, Intuition
A plain-language tour of the VEXA CDI Score. Three axes, not one number — because 'profitable' can hide the things that will break you later.
Every trading journal tells you whether you made money.
Almost none of them tell you why.
That’s the question VEXA’s CDI Score is built around. Not “did today go well,” but: what specifically, inside your trading, moved today? We reduced that question down to three axes — Confidence, Discipline, and Intuition — because one number is too blunt to be useful.
Why three, not one
A trader can be profitable on terrible discipline if they’re running a hot streak on setups that happen to be working. Another trader can be deeply disciplined but under-sized, hesitating out of trades that would have doubled. A third trader might have perfect rule adherence and average size, but keep fading into mediocre setups because they can’t tell which ones are theirs.
Three different problems. Same P&L curve. That’s why a single “score” always ends up either uselessly broad or quietly misleading.
CDI splits the signal. Each axis answers one question, and it answers it from your own data — not a questionnaire.
Confidence
Are you trading like you believe in your edge?
Confidence looks at the behaviours that show up when you trust (or don’t trust) what you’re seeing. The factors feeding this axis include things like:
- How consistent your position sizing is across setups of similar quality
- Whether you follow through after a loss, or shrink for the rest of the session
- Your hesitation pattern on A-grade setups — do you take them cleanly, or watch them go
- How often you trail too tight and cut winners that had room to run
It’s not about being more confident. Over-confident and under-confident trading both show up here, at opposite ends of the same axis.
Discipline
Are you following your own rules?
Discipline measures the gap between the trader you say you are and the trader your execution actually shows. Some of what contributes:
- Playbook adherence — did the trades you took actually match setups you defined
- Max-loss and max-trade limits — did you respect them
- Revenge-trade detection — trades clustered tightly after losses, against your own rules
- Session boundaries — trading before your prep is done, or after you said you’d stop
Discipline is the axis most traders underestimate in themselves. The scores that come back are often the most useful thing VEXA will tell you.
Intuition
Can you tell your A-setups from your B-setups in real time?
Intuition is the hardest axis to measure well, and it’s the one that separates traders who grow from traders who plateau. What feeds it:
- Your win rate on trades you flagged as high-conviction versus your overall win rate
- Time-to-entry on your highest-grade setups — how fast you recognise them
- Whether you correctly skip setups you later confirm were poor
- Pattern recognition across markets and sessions, not just your one favourite symbol
Intuition scores up when you’re seeing the market clearly. It drops when you’re forcing setups that aren’t there, or freezing on ones that are.
How it updates
CDI is computed daily. The inputs are your trade log, your journal entries (typed or voice), and — if you have Sentinel active — your biometric data. The output is three numbers, with a daily, weekly, and monthly view so you can see whether you’re trending.
We don’t break the percentages open in this post on purpose. The axis scores and the factors feeding them are the useful surface. The formulas underneath are where we spend most of our engineering time, and where the US Provisional patent sits.
What to do with a CDI Score
One rule we keep coming back to: don’t trade the score, trade the axes.
- If Discipline is dropping but Confidence is rising, you’re probably about to have a bad week.
- If Intuition is up but P&L is flat, you’re seeing it but not sizing it.
- If Discipline is high and all three are flat, something about your setup or market is stale.
A single “trader rating” can’t tell you any of that. Three axes can.
The point
The CDI Score isn’t a grade. It’s a mirror — three angles on the trader behind the P&L. The goal isn’t to get all three pinned at the top. It’s to notice when one starts dragging the others down, and fix it before the curve does.
