---
title: "Combined level"
description: "The Combined level is the tier of settings belonging to a Combined itself — how capital is split across its member strategies, refreshed, and de-risked."
canonical_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/getting-started/combined-level"
last_updated: "2026-07-25"
md_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/getting-started/combined-level.md"
---

# Combined level

The Combined level is the tier of settings that belongs to a [Combined](/docs/getting-started/combined) itself rather than to any of the strategies inside it — the layer that decides how capital is split across member strategies, how often that split is reset, and how the whole Combined de-risks. The app names its controls after it: **Combined rebalance**, **Combined allocation**, and **Combined risk**, grouped under "Combined — splits capital across strategies". Every member strategy keeps its own separate settings one level below.

**Also seen as:** Combined-level allocation, Combined-level risk, Combined-level rebalance

## What settings live at the Combined level?

Four groups live at the Combined level, and only these four: **Strategies** (which strategies are members, and their weights), **Combined rebalance** (how often the capital split is reset — see [rebalance](/docs/backtesting/rebalance)), **Combined allocation** ("How capital is split across strategies"), and **Combined risk** ("De-risk the whole Combined when markets turn"). Everything else — the instruments, the per-instrument weighting, the position exits — belongs to each member [strategy](/docs/getting-started/strategy), not to the Combined.

## How do the Combined level and the strategy level differ?

They are two independent layers, applied one after the other: the Combined level splits capital *across* member strategies, and each member's own allocation then weights instruments *inside* its share. Fincanva applies both and never collapses them into one. So changing a member's own allocation does not change how much capital that member receives, and changing the Combined allocation does not change what any member holds.

## Defaults in Fincanva

- Combined allocation offers six methods: [Equal Weights](/docs/strategies/equal-weights), Fixed Allocation, [Ranking-Based](/docs/strategies/ranking-based), Inverse Volatility, Risk Parity, and [MPT (Markowitz)](/docs/strategies/modern-portfolio-theory). Methods that exist only inside a single strategy, such as Market Cap, are not offered at the Combined level.
- With [**Fixed Allocation**](/docs/strategies/fixed-weights) you set a weight per member under "Strategy weights"; the raw weights need not add up to 100, because they are normalized.
- [**Invested portion**](/docs/backtesting/invested-portion) sets the share of capital the Combined deploys; whatever is not deployed stays as cash.
- **Combined risk** switches the whole Combined to its [Risk-Off](/docs/strategies/risk-on-and-risk-off) allocation when its conditions are met — it does not pause or stop the Combined. See [risk conditions](/docs/strategies/risk-conditions).
- The Combined level has no instruments and no position exits of its own; those exist only inside member strategies.

## Worked example

A Combined holds three member strategies and starts from 30,000. Its Combined allocation is **Equal Weights**, so the Combined level hands each member an equal third — 10,000 each. What happens to each 10,000 is decided one level down: the first member weights its five stocks equally at 2,000 apiece, the second uses [Inverse Volatility](/docs/strategies/inverse-volatility) across its holdings, and the third holds a single ETP for its whole 10,000. Switch the Combined allocation to [**Risk Parity**](/docs/strategies/risk-parity) and the three shares stop being equal, but each member's internal weighting is untouched — the two levels moved independently.