Confirmation delay

Also seen as: weeks delay, delay (the risk list shows a configured delay as "2-week delay", and the compact view as "confirm 2w").

What does the confirmation delay change?

It changes when a flip is acted on, never what the flip does. A condition with a delay of 0 asks for the switch as soon as its comparison is satisfied; a condition with a delay of 2 requires the flip to stand for two weeks before the strategy acts. Once the delay has elapsed, the strategy switches to the profile the condition asked for, exactly as it would have at 0 — the destination is the same, only the timing moved. Whether "acting" then means an off-schedule rebalance or a wait for the next scheduled one is decided separately, by Auto-rebalance on flip.

The delay also cuts both ways. It filters out the brief moves you did not want to react to, and it delays the lasting moves you did — it is the time-domain answer to whipsaw, a trade-off covered in When risk management changes your strategy's behavior.

Defaults in Fincanva

• The delay is a whole number of weeks from 0 to 12. Outside that range the app reports "Confirmation delay must be between 0 and 12 weeks."
• 0 means act immediately, and every built-in risk template arrives with the delay at 0 — if you want patience you add it yourself.
• The delay is set per condition, not per strategy: each of a strategy's up-to-two conditions carries its own value.
• There is one delay per condition, covering the condition itself — not a separate delay for going Risk-Off and another for coming back.
• The delay is counted in weeks regardless of the strategy's rebalance cadence, which is set in months by Rebalance every.

Worked example

A condition watches an index and its Confirmation delay (weeks) is set to 2. On a Monday the index dips past the Risk-Off threshold; by Wednesday it has recovered above it. The two weeks never elapsed, so the strategy stayed in Risk-On the whole time and the condition generated no trade at all — the dip is invisible in the results.

Now set that same condition's delay to 0. The Monday dip is enough to ask for Risk-Off, and Wednesday's recovery is enough to ask for Risk-On again, so a two-day wobble produces two switches of the allocation profile and the turnover that comes with them. The cost of the delay shows up in the other case: had the index kept falling instead of recovering, the 2-week setting would have put the strategy into Risk-Off two weeks later than the 0 setting would.

Learn more: How Risk-Off affects when your strategy rebalances