Your desk.
Every judgment you have made on a published issue, priced the way the file would have been: an amount committed before the answer, settled against the room once the pool closed.
6 ISSUES PUBLISHED · 1 POOL OPEN
You have not opened a position yet. Answer any of the 6 published drills and the desk opens with a NZ$10m limit.
Every judgment commits an amount before the answer is shown. When the next issue closes the pool, a correct read is paid out of it — and the fewer readers who took your option, the more it pays. Reading a file the way the room reads it is worth very little, even when the room is right.
Open the drills →// HOW THIS IS CALCULATED
A position. Every drill asks you to commit an amount before it shows you the answer. The three tickets are toehold at 10%, standard at 25% and full underwrite at 50% of your delegated limit. The amount is stamped when you commit it and never recalculated, so a ticket written against a NZ$10m limit is still that ticket when it settles, even if your limit has moved in between.
The pool closes when the next issue publishes. The senior banker’s read is still shown the moment you answer — that is the teaching and it does not wait. What waits is the money, because the odds depend on where the whole room landed and the room is still arriving.
What a correct read pays. The pool is a hundred units. 10 come off the top as your cost of funds — you borrowed the money to write the ticket, and the money was never free. The rest is divided among the readers who took the option the senior banker took. So the payout is 90 divided by the percentage of the room that read it your way: Issue 04 pays 4.29× because the senior banker took A while 42% of the room went to B, and Issue 01 pays 2.37× because most of the room was already there. A wrong read is impaired in full.
This is the point. Agreeing with the room and being right together is worth very little. Reading a file against the room and being right is worth a great deal. That is not a scoring quirk — it is what the series is about, priced.
The limit review. A week in which you take any position is a performing week. There are no titles on this desk — the limit is the rank. It is set by how many of the last 12 weeks performed: NZ$10m from 0; NZ$25m from 2; NZ$50m from 4; NZ$100m from 7; NZ$250m from 10 performing weeks. Miss a week and the limit goes to negative outlook with 7 days to cure it — any position will do, including re-reading an issue from months ago. Let the cure period lapse and the limit comes down one notch, once. It never goes below NZ$10m, because a system that can strand a returning reader at nothing has taught them that coming back is pointless.
Positions older than the desk. Judgments recorded before any of this existed have no amount attached. They count towards your cadence — you did the work — and they settle at par. Backdating a profit onto them would put a number in your book you never earned.
None of it is money. The amounts are denominated in NZ$m because that is the language of a credit desk. They cannot be transferred, sold, or redeemed for anything, here or elsewhere. The drills are free and stay free — all of them, indefinitely.
Where it lives. In this browser, under one key, and nowhere else. It is not sent anywhere, there is no account behind it, and it does not follow you to another device. Clearing your browser data clears it. What the site does record is set out separately.