Max positions

Also seen as: position cap, maximum positions, holdings limit.

What happens when more instruments qualify than the cap allows?

The cap is applied at each rebalance, and when the selection produces more candidates than the cap allows, the strategy's ranking — the ordering its allocation method works from — decides which of them are kept — the rest are simply not bought. A screener still reports every instrument it matches, and the cap then trims that set down to the number the strategy is allowed to hold. Max positions is not the only limit on that path, though: a max-symbols cap can trim the match set to its most liquid names before the ranking ever sees it. So the cap changes what the strategy owns, not what its screener found.

Two knock-on effects follow from that. A lower cap makes the strategy more concentrated and puts more weight on the ranking — explicit when the method is Ranking-Based — because a smaller number of survivors is decided by a finer cut of the same ordering. A higher cap spreads the same capital over more instruments and leans less on the ranking, because more of the qualifying set survives. Both are mechanical consequences of where the cut falls — neither is a recommendation.

Is max positions a control when I pick the instruments myself?

No — and this is the one place the cap is not something you set. When the selection is manual, Fincanva sets max positions to the number of instruments you picked, so the cap can never be the reason one of your own choices goes unheld. That covers a Single instrument strategy (one), a Multiple instruments strategy, and the Basket mode of a Full setup strategy. The field is not shown on those surfaces, because there is nothing left to decide: you already answered "how many?" by choosing them.

It remains a real control everywhere the selection is by rule — the Screen mode, and Compose, where it sits with the other selection rules. Those are the modes where the number of qualifying instruments is not known in advance, which is exactly when a cap has something to do.

How high can max positions go?

Fincanva does not publish a fixed upper limit for max positions, and this page deliberately does not state one. The ceiling is not an engine constant: the engine imposes no user-facing maximum, and the limit a given account may use is a per-account capability resolved on the Fincanva side. Today the app applies a single validation range to every account and does not yet resolve an account-specific ceiling, so the number you can enter is not yet a statement about your own account. Until per-account resolution ships, treat the field's own validation as the only limit in force and read the value the app accepts rather than a number quoted in docs.

Defaults in Fincanva

• Always on. Unlike the other per-position controls, max positions has no on/off switch — a strategy always carries a cap, which keeps its results bounded and comparable.
• The value is a whole number of instruments, entered directly in the field — except on a manual selection, where Fincanva sets it to the number of instruments picked and shows no field.
• The cap is per strategy. Inside a Combined, each member strategy carries its own cap, so the Combined can hold more instruments in total than any one of its members.
• The cap is applied at each rebalance, so it constrains the target portfolio the strategy is aiming at, not just its first buy-in.
• It is independent of the time-based controls: max hold decides how long a position may stay, and reinvest delay how long a freed slot waits, while max positions decides only how many slots there are.

Worked example

A strategy's screener matches 14 instruments and max positions is set to 10. At the rebalance the strategy ranks all 14, keeps the top 10, and holds those; the remaining 4 are matched but not bought, and they appear nowhere in the strategy's holdings. The eleventh-ranked instrument is the first one left out — it qualified on every filter and was excluded purely by the cap.

Raise the cap to 14 and all of them are held, each at a smaller share of the same capital. Lower it to 5 and only the top five survive, so the strategy becomes markedly more concentrated and small changes in the ranking now change half its portfolio.

Fincanva does not recommend how many positions to hold — a wider or narrower cap is a mechanical consequence of where the cut falls, not a suggestion. See Is this financial advice?.