How We Read the Table - The Five-Step Method

Twenty charts. Six markets. One decision. That is the promise the Sunday Read opens with, and it is not a slogan - it is a workflow. Every Sunday we sit down with one table, spend about ninety seconds on it, and come away knowing which single chart deserves our attention going into the week. No forecasts, no price targets. Just a reading method.

This article is that method in full - the five steps, on the real data from the July 31 table, exactly as we walked them in the first episode. If you prefer to watch, the episode is below. If you prefer to read, everything is here.

What you're looking at

The table is a Sentinel scan: one row per market and timeframe, six columns per row. Symbol. Status - the phase the market is in, with labels like Distributing, Recovering, or Contraction. Momentum - a number that tells you how that phase is currently going. Trend - whether the trend layer confirms what the other two are saying. Money Flow - a participation gauge. And t - how long ago the current label was earned.

One note on Money Flow, because it is the easiest column to misread. Money Flow measures how far the volume-weighted price has stretched away from its own average - which means it follows price. It does not front-run it. The information that leads lives somewhere else: in the divergence between Momentum and Money Flow. When those two disagree, something is happening that price alone has not settled yet. Track the gap, not the level.*

As of v1.2 - shipped the week of the pilot - the top rows of the table also follow whatever chart you have open, so the scan and the chart stay in one conversation.

Step 1 - Read columns, not rows

A single row is an anecdote. The column is the story.

The instinct is to read the table like a spreadsheet - left to right, one market at a time. Resist it. The first pass is vertical: run your eye down the Status column and let the labels aggregate into a picture of the whole board.

On July 31 that vertical scan said more than any single market could. Four of the five markets on the board wore Distributing. The euro was the odd one out, reading Recovering. And SPY's higher timeframes sat in Contraction. That is a regime statement - broad distribution with one currency trying to turn - and you get it in five seconds, before you have formed an opinion about anything.

Step 2 - Status is a noun. Momentum is an adjective.

The noun names the phase. The adjective tells you how the phase is going.

Once the column has given you the regime, go back for the pairs. Status and Momentum answer two different questions, and most misreadings of a scanner come from confusing them - trading the noun as if it moves, or trusting the adjective as if it names the phase.

The July 31 board offered a clean demonstration. SPY daily: Distributing, momentum 0.71 and rising. Bitcoin daily: Distributing, momentum -0.51 and falling. Same noun, opposite adjectives. One is a distribution phase being pressed against from below; the other is a distribution phase behaving exactly as labeled. Identical labels, entirely different sentences - and the difference is the reading. Disagreement between noun and adjective is where you will eventually open a chart.

Step 3 - Sticky states are a feature

One sunny day doesn't end the autumn.

Status labels on this table are deliberately sticky. Recovering and Distributing hold until the opposite zone retires them - a label describes a phase, not the last candle. A state that flipped on every green day would be a mood ring, not an instrument.

So when you see a label persist through a move against it, the table is not lagging. It is telling you the burden of proof has not been met yet. That patience is the point: phases end when they are ended, not when they are argued with.

Step 4 - Trust, but timestamp

Every label is honest about its age.

Markets run on different clocks, and the table admits it. The t column tells you how long ago each label was earned - and a label earned this week is a different object from a label that has been sitting there for two months. The fresh one describes a turn in progress; the old one describes an established regime.

So before you weigh any label, check its age. Same word, different vintage, different meaning. Trust the table - but timestamp it.

Step 5 - Triage, then open exactly one chart

The table's job is to make you open fewer charts, not more.

By now the board has done its triage for you: the regime from the column, the disagreements from the pairs, the context from the ages. The final step is to open the single chart where the tension is loudest - and on July 31, that was EURUSD.

The euro's row read Recovering - the only recovery noun on the board - while momentum sat at -0.46 and falling, and money flow was deeply negative. A recovery attempt that isn't being paid for. That sentence is the whole reason to open the chart.

And the chart had a structure to test it against: an Accumulate zone printed five weeks earlier, a base built on top of it, and price attempting to reclaim. From there the week becomes a question, not a prediction: does the reclaim get accepted, or rejected? We do not need to know the answer in advance. Either answer is information.

New to zones? Start with What an Accumulation Zone Actually Is.

The ninety-second ritual

Column first, pairs second, age always, one chart at the end. That is the whole method: scan the Status column for the regime, mark where nouns and adjectives disagree, remember that labels are sticky on purpose, timestamp everything, and let the triage hand you exactly one chart to study. Ninety seconds, no forecasts.

We run this ritual every Sunday and publish the reading in Structura Notes. The structure layer we test those charts against - Accumulate - is free on TradingView. And the table will argue with itself again next week; that is what it is for.

---

* Note: the video version oversimplified the Money Flow definition - a member caught it, and episode 2 opens with the correction. The text above uses the accurate version.