Before you start
You need one of your own strategies — a Public strategy has no Live control, because it is not yours to follow. There is no separate "create a portfolio" step: a portfolio is a strategy you have marked Live, which is why Portfolios and Strategies show the same rows filtered differently.
Live is monitoring only. Fincanva places no orders, connects to no broker, and moves no money — see Mark Live.
Steps
- Open the strategy, or find its row on Strategies.
- Flip the switch in the strategy's title cluster — it reads Off until you do — 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 Portfolios and count toward your dashboard."
- Confirm with Mark as Live. Cancel backs out and changes nothing.
What you should see
The switch turns and reads Live, and the strategy appears on the Portfolios page as one row of your live book. Its star turns on and locks while it stays Live, its numbers start being kept current for you as new market data arrives, and it begins counting toward the summary strip at the top of the page. Reading what it now holds is Read your order plan; keeping the whole book healthy is Keep your live book in order.
Marking a strategy Live is not a prediction that it will perform, and Fincanva never suggests which strategy to follow — see Is this financial advice?.
What changes once a strategy is Live?
Four things, and none of them involve money — Mark Live lists them. The one that surprises people is what does not change: editing a Live strategy does not re-run it by itself, so an edited strategy sits with a stale result until you run it, exactly as it would if it were not Live.
How do I stop following a strategy?
Flip the same switch back, or select Unfollow in the row menu. Fincanva asks "Stop following this strategy?" and tells you what that costs — "It'll leave Portfolios and stop counting toward your dashboard." — and commits with Stop following. 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.
Common problems
The strategy I want to follow has no Live switch
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 never starts Live: Duplicate and Copy to Mine both produce a strategy whose switch starts 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 switch again.
The switch is refused with a message naming your plan
This is not the generic toast above — it is your plan talking. Your account is already at the number of strategies your plan follows Live, so this one has nowhere to go: the refusal states the plan and how many it allows, and offers the step that would raise the number, named on its own button rather than a generic "Upgrade". This is the plan compliance check, and it answers the same way whether you flip the switch in the strategy's title cluster or pick Mark Live from the row's menu on Strategies.
I marked a strategy Live but Portfolios 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 Holdings view says so directly: "Backtest this strategy to see its target portfolio."
Terms on this page
Auto-generatedEvery defined term this page uses, matched against the corpus — including the alias forms the prose actually says.