Invested portion

The invested portion is the share of a Combined's capital that the allocation profile puts to work; whatever is left over is held as a cash reserve. You set it as a single percentage, so an invested portion of 75% deploys three-quarters of the capital and keeps one-quarter in cash.

How is the deployed amount calculated?

Multiply the profile's capital by the invested portion; the remainder is the reserve, and a negative remainder is borrowed money.

The deployed amount D is what the allocation method then splits across the strategies the Combined holds; R never reaches them. When p is above 1, R is negative: (p − 1) × C is borrowed, and the Combined's cash balance is negative by that amount. Deploying D does not mean spending exactly D: whole-share rounding leaves a little of it unspent, which is target vs deployed.

Four presets cover the common cases, with a slider for anything else:

The presets stop at 100% on purpose: investing above it is always a Custom value, set on the slider.

What happens to the cash reserve?

The reserve stays as cash: it is not allocated to any strategy and takes no market exposure, so it neither rises nor falls with the instruments the Combined holds. It accrues interest in the simulation only when the Costs & interests simulation assumption is on; that assumption is off by default, so on the figures you meet first the reserve, as idle cash, earns nothing at all — see interest received and paid.

Its effect on results is symmetric: a reserve dampens gains and losses in the same proportion, because only the deployed share of capital is exposed to the market. Holding half in cash halves the impact of a market move, in both directions — what a backtest computes is otherwise unchanged. The return the reserve gives up over a rising window is cash drag, which is the same arithmetic read from the other side.

Above 100% the Combined invests more than its capital and borrows the difference: at 150% it deploys one and a half times its capital, and its cash balance goes negative by half its capital — a margin debt. The borrowed part works exactly like leverage on a single strategy: gains and losses on the deployed amount are magnified in the same proportion, in both directions. The debt is financed the same way, at the same rate, and only when the Costs & interests assumption is on — what leverage costs is the canonical statement.

Investing above 100% is included on any plan that includes a Combined at all — from the Advanced plan level on — up to 300%, bounded by the plan's leverage ceiling, which is stated once on leverage. The invested portion exists only on a Combined, so there is no lower plan step where it applies. See what each plan includes.

A Combined holds 10,000 and its allocation profile is set to Mostly invested (75%). Deployed is 0.75 × 10,000 = 7,500, and the cash reserve is 0.25 × 10,000 = 2,500. The allocation method then splits the 7,500 across the strategies in the Combined; the 2,500 sits in cash and is allocated to nothing.

Now suppose the deployed holdings fall 10% over a month. The loss is 10% of 7,500 = 750, which is 7.5% of the Combined's 10,000 — not 10%, because a quarter of the capital was never exposed. The same arithmetic runs upward: a 10% rise would be 750, or 7.5% of total capital. The reserve did not protect the deployed part; it simply kept a quarter of the capital out of the move.

Set the same Combined to a Custom 150% instead. Deployed is 1.5 × 10,000 = 15,000, and the reserve is (1 − 1.5) × 10,000 = −5,000: 5,000 borrowed. The same 10% fall now costs 1,500, or 15% of the Combined's capital, before the interest on the 5,000 — and a 10% rise gains 15%.

Fincanva does not tell you how much of your capital to put to work or how much to hold in cash — see Is this financial advice?.