Duplicate and Copy to Mine

Earlier releases labelled Duplicate Create a copy or Save as copy. Both labels are retired; the app says Duplicate everywhere.

What does a copy keep, and what does it drop?

A copy keeps the configuration and drops the history — so it is the same idea with a clean slate:

Because the results are dropped, a fresh copy has never been run: its run status reads Not run until you back-test it. Nothing you then do to the copy — editing, running, deleting — reaches the original.

Which of the two you get depends on who owns the item, not on what you want to do with it.

What does Duplicate do?

Duplicate makes an independent copy of an item you already own — a variant of your own strategy, a second screener that starts from the first. It appears as Duplicate in the item's title menu, its row menu, and its page header, and it is the only copy action offered on something in your own library.

Duplicate is not the same as Save as new screener, the button in a Fin suggestion review — that saves a suggested set of filters as a separate screener instead of overwriting yours.

What does Copy to Mine do?

Copy to Mine copies an item from the Public tab into your own library, and it is the only way to get an editable version of a Public item. The Public original is never touched — you are working on your own copy from the moment it lands.

It refuses to run on anything else: use it on an item you already own and the app answers Copy to Mine is only available for Public items. That refusal is the clean statement of the split — Public items get Copy to Mine, your own items get Duplicate.

Where does the "Created from" line come from?

The muted Created from {sources} — {date} line is provenance for a Combined: it appears when a Combined strategy was built out of existing strategies, and it names them and the date. A plain Duplicate or Copy to Mine does not stamp it — a copy carries no recorded link back to what it was copied from, and the only trace is the name the app suggests.

Defaults in Fincanva

• The suggested name is the original's name with (copy) appended, and you can replace it before committing.
• A copy uses the last saved version of the source, so unsaved edits are excluded — save before copying if you want them in.
• On success the app confirms with Copy created.
• A copy always starts with Live off, whichever way you made it, so it never joins your live book by accident (see Mark Live).
• Any copy's name is auto-adjusted if it would collide with a strategy already in the folder it lands in: Fincanva appends (1), (2) and so on. This applies to Duplicate as well as Copy to Mine, and to the name you type yourself in the prompt — two strategies in one folder can never share a name.

Worked example

You own a strategy called "Momentum EU" and want to try a monthly rebalance without losing the quarterly version. You choose Duplicate; the prompt offers "Momentum EU (copy)" and you rename it to "Momentum EU monthly". The copy appears at the top level of Mine with every setting from the last saved "Momentum EU" — same instruments, same allocation, same benchmark — but with no results at all, so its status reads Not run.

You change the cadence to monthly, save, and back-test. You now have two independent strategies with comparable settings and separate result histories. "Momentum EU" never moved, was never re-run, and if it happened to be followed Live, the copy did not inherit that.