Capital chart

Also seen as: the Growth chart, the capital growth view.

What are the series on the capital chart?

Read in money, the Growth chart carries four series and two vertical axes.

• Total value is the filled area covering everything the strategy is worth on that date — positions plus cash together. Its axis is titled Value.
• Cash capital is a second area drawn inside the first, showing the part of that total which is not in positions. The distance between the two areas is therefore the invested part, so the split reads off the gap rather than off a separate line.
• Benchmark is a dashed line on the same axis, the benchmark's own money curve over the same dates from the same starting capital.
• Drawdown is the shorter panel underneath, on its own Drawdown axis: an area hanging down from zero showing how far below its previous peak the strategy was on each date. See max drawdown.

A toggle in the chart header switches the whole chart between money — labelled with your account's base-currency code — and %, which redraws the same result as cumulative return. In the % reading the single line is Growth and there is no cash series, because a share of a total has no cash component; the Drawdown panel stays. See equity curve for how to read the curve itself.

Why does the cash band matter?

Because the gap between Total value and Cash capital is the plainest available answer to "how much of my capital was actually working?". A strategy that holds a cash reserve, or that stops holding positions for a stretch, shows that as a thicker cash band in exactly the dates it happened — which is something no single metric on the metrics page reports. The Holdings view reports the same split for a single date, as Cash % and capital invested.

Two settings move that band. A strategy's invested share decides how much capital is put to work in the first place, with the remainder held as a cash reserve; see invested capital and the cash reserve. And a risk condition switches the strategy to its Risk-Off allocation profile, which typically holds a lower invested share — so on the chart a Risk-Off stretch reads as the cash band widening.

What else is on the Capital Growth page?

• A Summary card beside the chart: Current value as its headline, then Invested and Profit, plus the CAGR and max drawdown, closing with the dated span of the run. Invested here means the capital that was put in at the start of the run — not the amount currently in positions, which is what the chart's cash band describes.
• A P&L breakdown chart, which splits the same result into its gain and cost components. See P&L breakdown.
• A KPI strip above them: Final value, Vs benchmark, Max drawdown and CAGR.

Defaults in Fincanva

• Total value and Cash capital are money figures in your account's base currency; Growth and Drawdown are percentages.
• The chart, the P&L breakdown and the range selector share one date range, so narrowing the period narrows all of them together.
• Three display switches — Inflation-adj., Benchmark and Log scale — change how the chart is drawn without re-running the backtest. See chart toggles.
• The chart appears only after a completed run; before that the page reads "Run this strategy to generate its capital analysis — use Save & Run from the strategy editor."

Worked example

A strategy starts with 100,000 and is set to invest 90% of it, so from the first date the chart shows a Total value area of 100,000 with a Cash capital band of 10,000 held underneath — the strategy is running with 90,000 at work.

Three years in, the strategy's risk condition turns on and it switches to a Risk-Off allocation that invests only 40%. On the chart the Cash capital band jumps from roughly a tenth of the total to well over half of it, and stays there for as long as the condition is active. The Total value area barely moves in that moment, because switching to cash does not by itself gain or lose money — it changes the exposure, not the value. What you then see is the Total value line flattening out while the market moves, and the Drawdown panel below staying shallower than it would have been fully invested. When the condition clears, the cash band narrows again and the total resumes tracking the market.

That whole sequence is invisible on a percentage-return chart, which would only show a flat stretch with no explanation for it.

What should the cash band look like?

There is no shape it should have — the band simply reports what the strategy's own rules produced. A permanently thick band means most of the capital sat idle for the period, and a band that appears only in specific stretches means something in the strategy moved it there on those dates. A wide band is neither a gain nor a loss in itself; it is exposure you did not take, in both directions — what the reserve itself earns while it sits there is a separate matter, covered on interest received and paid.

These figures describe what a strategy would have done on historical data, not what it will do. Fincanva provides no financial advice — see Is this financial advice?.