The capstone

The taught curriculum ends at School IX; the capstone is where all of it runs at once, for real, on paper. It's a single campaign in School VI's sense — thirty trades under one written ruleset, journaled end to end — and it's graded entirely on process, because you now know from School VIII, course 1 how little thirty trades' worth of P&L can prove. Whether the discipline held across thirty trades is something the record can actually show, so that's what the grade is built from.

Before the first trade

You write and date your campaign documents, and the Arena holds you to them:

1. The ruleset — your setups (School V's three types or your VIII·6-tested variants), the full checklist order, R fixed in euros at campaign start (chosen as a fraction of the account at that moment, and constant for the campaign's life so every result stays comparable), the position cap, the management scheme, and the hold-through-earnings policy (IX·3).
2. The risk contracts — heat ceiling and daily new-risk limit (VI·1), theme caps (VI·2), the drawdown protocol with its thresholds (VI·4), and your personal circuit breakers with their numbers (VII·6).
3. Your tells — the list from VII·4, each with its tripwire response.

During

Every trade passes the ritual gate (the Arena will refuse it otherwise) and gets the full journal treatment of V·6, including the state-of-mind line and the process grade. The weekly scenario note (VI·5) and the regime reading (IV·5) go in the journal on schedule. Time is expected to pass: a real campaign spans months, includes stretches where the checklist yields nothing, and holding nothing through those stretches is part of what's being examined.

Grading

At thirty trades (or at the drawdown protocol's final threshold, which ends any campaign), the batch review runs in full, and the campaign passes on process:

• Ritual completeness: every trade gated and journaled — 30/30 in a full campaign, N/N in one the protocol ended early. A protocol-terminated campaign still runs this whole review; it is marked "ended by protocol" and can pass on process (the protocol being honored is process), with the next campaign starting on the re-entry ladder as usual. It must still hold at least ten graded trades: a campaign that ends before that has not shown enough process to grade, and continues as a fresh campaign rather than passing on a handful.
• The contract held: no widened stops, no cap breaches, and every stop move citing its structural fact. Average loss stays ≈ 1R after excluding engine-tagged gap excess — a gapped stop that cost 4R with nobody breaking a rule (II·6) is honest simulation, not a contract violation, and the Arena tags the excess so the review can cite it.
• Grades: process grades predominantly A, and zero unexamined F's. An F with an honest post-mortem and its breaker honored is passable. An F that never got examined is the one thing this campaign treats as a real failure.
• The review itself: expectancy computed by setup type, the two-column audit (VII·3), one process change identified with its evidence — demonstrating you can run the improvement loop unassisted, because that loop is what you graduate to.

P&L is recorded, discussed in the review, and not graded. A campaign that loses 4R with spotless process passes. A campaign that makes 12R on widened stops and ungated entries fails, because the 12R came from breaking the contract, and the contract is what's being examined.

After

A passed capstone earns the Academy's certificate — an internal recognition of demonstrated process discipline, and explicitly not a regulated qualification, a performance promise, or advice of any kind. What it records is thirty consecutive trades in which the calm version of you made every decision. After that the next campaign is yours to design: School VIII's playbook loop, the ladder to live pilots whenever your own promotion gates say so, and a curriculum behind you that was always meant to end with you needing it less.