---
title: "What is Fincanva, and what can you do with it?"
description: "Fincanva is a research and simulation tool: a strategy-building and backtesting platform where you build, combine, screen, backtest, and analyze strategies."
canonical_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/getting-started/what-is-fincanva-and-what-can-you-do-with-it"
last_updated: "2026-08-02"
md_url: "https://fincanva.com/docs/getting-started/what-is-fincanva-and-what-can-you-do-with-it.md"
---

# What is Fincanva, and what can you do with it?

Fincanva is a research and simulation tool: a strategy-building and backtesting platform for investment strategies on historical market data. Concretely, it lets you build a strategy, combine strategies, screen instruments, backtest, analyze the result, and refine what you built — all before you decide whether to follow a strategy over time.

## What kind of tool is Fincanva?
Fincanva is a research and simulation tool, not an advisor: it lets you design a strategy's rules and see how those rules would have behaved on historical data, rather than telling you what to buy or sell. The unit you design is a strategy (formerly called a *model*) — a saved set of instruments plus the rules for allocating capital and changing positions; see [What is a strategy?](/docs/strategies/what-is-a-strategy-in-fincanva) for what it contains.

## What can you do with Fincanva?
You can do six things with Fincanva, in the order most strategies move through them:

- **Build a strategy** — save a set of instruments together with allocation and rule settings as a strategy (formerly called a *model*). See [Create a strategy](/docs/strategies/create-a-strategy-and-choose-its-instruments).
- **Combine strategies** — blend several strategies into one combined strategy (formerly called a *portfolio*).
- **Screen instruments** — use a screener to select instruments by rule instead of picking them one by one.
- **Backtest** — run a strategy over historical data to see how its rules would have behaved.
- **Analyze results** — read the equity curve and headline figures such as [CAGR](/docs/analysis/cagr) and [max drawdown](/docs/analysis/max-drawdown).
- **Refine and follow** — adjust the rules and re-run the backtest, and optionally follow a strategy going forward as new data arrives.

[The Fincanva loop](/docs/getting-started/the-fincanva-loop) walks through how these steps connect in practice; [Get started with Fincanva in five steps](/docs/getting-started/get-started-with-fincanva-in-five-steps) walks a new account through them directly.

## How current is the data behind a backtest?
Fincanva's market data updates daily, so a backtest runs to the latest available market close. Re-running the same strategy on a later day can produce a different result, simply because there is more history for it to run over.

## Limits and edge cases
Fincanva gives no financial or investment advice, and a backtest shows what a strategy's rules would have done on historical data — not a prediction of what will happen next; see [Is this financial advice?](/docs/investing-theory/is-this-financial-advice) for the full disclaimer. [Biases Fincanva helps you avoid](/docs/getting-started/the-nine-biases-fincanva-helps-you-avoid) covers the reasoning pitfalls a research-and-simulation workflow is built to counter. Nothing here is a commitment either: everything you build stays yours to remove, and [account deletion](/docs/account-security/account-deletion) is a scheduled request with a 14-day window you can cancel from, not an immediate erase.

## Related
For what a strategy is made of, see [What is a strategy?](/docs/strategies/what-is-a-strategy-in-fincanva). For what actually happens when you run one, see [How a backtest works](/docs/backtesting/how-backtesting-works). To try it yourself, follow [Get started with Fincanva in five steps](/docs/getting-started/get-started-with-fincanva-in-five-steps).