What is Fincanva, and what can you do with it?

What kind of tool is Fincanva?

Fincanva is a research and simulation tool, not an advisor: it lets you design a strategy's rules and see how those rules would have behaved on historical data, rather than telling you what to buy or sell. The unit you design is a strategy (formerly called a model) — a saved set of instruments plus the rules for allocating capital and changing positions; see What is a strategy? for what it contains.

What can you do with Fincanva?

You can do six things with Fincanva, in the order most strategies move through them:

• Build a strategy — save a set of instruments together with allocation and rule settings as a strategy (formerly called a model). See Create a strategy.
• Combine strategies — blend several strategies into one combined strategy (formerly called a portfolio).
• Screen instruments — use a screener to select instruments by rule instead of picking them one by one.
• Backtest — run a strategy over historical data to see how its rules would have behaved.
• Analyze results — read the equity curve and headline figures such as CAGR and max drawdown.
• Refine and follow — adjust the rules and re-run the backtest, and optionally follow a strategy going forward as new data arrives.

The Fincanva loop walks through how these steps connect in practice; Get started with Fincanva in five steps walks a new account through them directly.

How current is the data behind a backtest?

Fincanva's market data updates daily, so a backtest runs to the latest available market close. Re-running the same strategy on a later day can produce a different result, simply because there is more history for it to run over.

Limits and edge cases

Fincanva gives no financial or investment advice, and a backtest shows what a strategy's rules would have done on historical data — not a prediction of what will happen next; see Is this financial advice? for the full disclaimer. Biases Fincanva helps you avoid covers the reasoning pitfalls a research-and-simulation workflow is built to counter. Nothing here is a commitment either: everything you build stays yours to remove, and account deletion is a scheduled request with a 14-day window you can cancel from, not an immediate erase.

Related

For what a strategy is made of, see What is a strategy?. For what actually happens when you run one, see How a backtest works. To try it yourself, follow Get started with Fincanva in five steps.