Reinvest delay

Also seen as: Wait before reinvest (the control's accessible name is "Wait before reinvest months"), cash cooldown.

What does reinvest delay do to freed-up cash?

Reinvest delay parks the proceeds of a closed position in cash for the number of months you set, so the strategy skips the rebalances that fall inside that window rather than immediately buying something else with the money. Without it, cash released by an exit is available to be redeployed at the very next rebalance; with it, that same cash is held back and the strategy runs with a larger cash share until the delay expires.

The delay is counted in whole multiples of the strategy's rebalance interval, so the slot comes back into play on a rebalance date rather than on an arbitrary day — the same whole-multiples clock that governs rebalance cadence and every timing setting bound to it.

Two consequences are worth spelling out. A longer delay means a strategy that has just closed several positions can sit with a meaningful cash weight for a while, which shows up in its invested capital rather than in its holdings list. And a delay does not free the position count: how many instruments a strategy may hold at once is set separately by max positions.

Defaults in Fincanva

• Off by default. When you switch it on, the value starts at the strategy's own rebalance interval — always a valid multiple — and you raise it from there.
• Entered in months (the field's suffix reads "mo"), up to a maximum of 120 months; a value that is not a whole multiple of the cadence is rejected with "Must be a multiple of {rebalanceEvery} months".
• Changing the rebalance cadence does not change a value you have already set: if it is no longer a whole multiple of the new cadence, the field flags it with "Must be a multiple of {rebalanceEvery} months" and you pick a valid value.
• The delay applies to the cash a closed position frees, whatever closed it — a take profit, a stop loss, a max hold, or a rebalance that dropped the instrument.

Worked example

A strategy rebalances every month, holds ten positions, and has reinvest delay set to 3 months. At the March rebalance one holding is dropped, freeing roughly a tenth of the strategy's capital. With no delay, that cash would be spent at the same rebalance on whatever the strategy's allocation method picks next. With a three-month delay, it instead sits in cash: the April and May rebalances leave the freed slot empty, so the strategy runs those two months with a cash share it would otherwise have invested. At the June rebalance — three months on — the slot is back in play and the cash is redeployed.

Set the delay to 1 month instead and the same slot is idle only through April. Turn the setting off and there is no idle period at all: the slot is refilled at the March rebalance that emptied it.