Capital

What does changing Capital do?

Changing Capital re-sizes the order plan and nothing else. The strategy's rules, its allocation, and its saved backtest results are untouched; what changes is how much money those weights are applied to. Because weights are ratios, doubling the capital doubles every target notional and roughly doubles every share count — it never changes what the strategy wants to hold, only how much of it. The page re-requests its figures at the new amount, dimming briefly while they are rebuilt.

How is Capital different from starting capital?

Capital sizes today's target orders; starting capital sizes the historical simulation. Starting capital is the amount a backtest begins with at the start of the simulated period and then compounds forward, so it lives in the strategy's settings and changing it makes the last run out of date. Capital on the Holdings view answers "what would this portfolio look like at this much money, right now" — it re-runs nothing, and it is not saved with the strategy.

Defaults in Fincanva

• The field is labelled Capital, prefixed with your base currency's symbol, and opens at 100,000.
• The amount is a view parameter: it is not stored with the strategy and does not trigger a new backtest.
• While the page is refreshing the field is disabled; if the refresh fails, the field reverts to the last working amount and the page shows Couldn't update — reverted to the last result.
• A larger capital usually raises accuracy, because the whole-share rounding leftover on each holding is a smaller slice of a bigger book.
• Cash % and capital invested are percentages of whatever Capital you set, so scaling the amount moves the money behind them far more than it moves the split itself.
• These are paper figures. Fincanva monitors a live-followed strategy without trading, so no order plan it produces ever reaches a broker (see Portfolio).

Worked example

A target portfolio holds four instruments at weights of 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10%. With Capital at 100,000 their target values are 40,000 / 30,000 / 20,000 / 10,000. Type 25,000 instead and the weights do not move, but every target value scales to a quarter — 10,000 / 7,500 / 5,000 / 2,500 — and each share count is recomputed at the instrument's own price. The strategy is unchanged; you have only asked what the same portfolio looks like on a quarter of the money. Accuracy typically dips a little at the smaller figure, because one unbuyable fraction of a share now weighs more against a smaller book.

Capital only rescales the target figures this page displays. It is not a suggested amount to invest, and Fincanva does not recommend how much money to put behind any strategy. Fincanva provides no financial advice — see Is this financial advice?.