Follow a strategy live
You follow a strategy by marking it Live: Fincanva starts tracking what its rules would hold from today forward and lists it on the Live page — monitoring only, with no order placed and no money moved.
Target positions & exits
| Symbol | Asset type | Side | Last | Quantity | Target value | Deployed | Exits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
V Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF VTI | USD 312.40 | 32 | USD 10,000 | USD 9,997 100.0% | |||
I iShares S&P Small-Cap 600 Value ETF IJS | USD 103.85 | 96 | USD 10,000 | USD 9,970 99.7% | — | ||
S SPDR Gold Shares GLD | USD 248.10 | 40 | USD 10,000 | USD 9,924 99.2% | — | ||
I iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF TLT | USD 89.95 | 111 | USD 10,000 | USD 9,984 99.8% | — | ||
I iShares 1-3 Year Treasury Bond ETF SHY | USD 82.30 | 115 | USD 9,500 | USD 9,465 99.6% | — | ||
| Total | USD 49,339 99.7% | ||||||
Steps
- Open one of your own strategies, or find its row on Strategies. There is no separate step to create a Live strategy: a Live strategy is a strategy you have marked Live, which is why Live and Strategies show the same rows filtered differently.
- Press the Live key on the strategy's action row — a neutral raised key until you do, its tooltip reading Go live — or select Mark Live in the row's menu.
- Read the confirmation. It asks "Mark this strategy as Live?" and states what follows: "It'll show in Live and count toward your dashboard."
- Confirm with Mark as Live. Cancel backs out and changes nothing.
Done. The key turns bright green with the rising line moving, still reading Live, and the strategy is one row of your live book on Live. Fincanva places no orders, connects to no broker and moves no money — see Does marking a strategy Live trade anything? Reading what it now holds is Read your order plan; keeping the whole book healthy is Keep your live book in order.
What changes once a strategy is Live?
Four things change, and none of them touch money:
- It appears in Live, as the confirmation says.
- Its results are kept current automatically. Live strategies are refreshed for you as new market data arrives; a strategy that is not Live only recomputes when you press Run or Re-run — run status covers the states you will see.
- It is starred, and the star locks while it stays Live: trying to unstar it shows "Turn the strategy off first". The star locks yellow in the dashboard table and in the strategy's header; in the sidebar library the row shows instead a small bright-green square carrying only the rising line, which a screen reader announces as "Live". Starring strategies and screeners covers the star, the lock and the favourites cap.
- It counts toward your dashboard, where its numbers feed the book summary panel.
What does not change: editing a Live strategy never re-runs it by itself, so an edited strategy waits with a stale result until you run it, exactly as it would if it were not Live.
How do I stop following a strategy?
Press the same key again, or select Unfollow in the row menu. Fincanva asks "Stop following this strategy?" and tells you what that costs — "It'll leave Live and stop counting toward your dashboard." — and commits with Stop following. Turning Live off is never refused. Nothing about the strategy itself changes: its settings and its whole backtest history are untouched, its star unlocks, and you can mark it Live again whenever you want.
Why can't I mark a strategy Live?
The strategy I want to follow has no Live key
It is a Public strategy, which cannot be followed because it is not yours. Make your own copy first with Copy to Mine, then mark the copy Live; a copy always starts with its Live key off.
A toast says "Couldn't update Live status. Try again."
The change did not go through, so the strategy is still in whatever state it was before. Nothing is half-applied — try the key again.
The Live key is refused with a message naming your plan
Your account already follows as many strategies Live as your plan allows. The refusal names your plan and how many it allows, says how many you are following and that nothing is deleted, and offers the plan level that raises the number on its own button rather than a generic "Upgrade". This is the plan compliance check, and it answers the same way from the action row and from Mark Live in the row's menu. A set-aside strategy is refused differently — see Choose which strategies stay Live.
I marked a strategy Live but the Live page shows nothing to act on
That is the healthy state, not a fault. Until the strategy has a completed run there is no target book to show, and the Positions view says so: "Backtest this strategy to see its target positions."
UPDATED 2026-10-11REVIEWED 2026-10-07