Max positions caps how many instruments a strategy may hold at the same time, so a selection that qualifies twenty candidates still holds only as many as the cap allows. It is a concentration control rather than an exit rule: it decides the width of the portfolio at every rebalance, not when an individual position leaves.
Also seen as: position cap, maximum positions, holdings limit.
How does Fincanva handle it?
- The control is labelled Max positions, under Selection rules on the strategy's Asset selection card; its dotted underline shows this definition and opens this page.
- The highest cap your plan allows is 5 on Free, 10 on Starter, 25 on Advanced, and 50 on Ultimate and Professional. The value in force is the lower of that and the 50 the field itself accepts, which is why Ultimate and Professional both show the same 50 here and no upgrade between them raises it further. See what each plan includes.
- Always on: unlike the other per-position controls it has no on/off switch, so a strategy always carries a cap, which keeps its results bounded and comparable. The value is a whole number of instruments — except on a manual selection, where Fincanva sets it and shows no field.
- The cap is per strategy: inside a Combined each member strategy carries its own, so the Combined can hold more instruments in total than any one member.
- It is applied at each rebalance, so it constrains the target portfolio, not just the first buy-in. It is independent of max hold, which decides how long a position may stay, and reinvest delay, which decides how long a closed instrument stays out.
What does it look like in practice?
A strategy's screener matches 14 instruments and max positions is set to 10. At the rebalance the strategy ranks all 14, keeps the top 10, and holds those; the remaining 4 are matched but not bought, and they appear nowhere in the strategy's holdings. The eleventh-ranked instrument is the first one left out — it qualified on every filter and was excluded purely by the cap.
Raise the cap to 14 and all of them are held, each at a smaller share of the same capital. Lower it to 5 and only the top five survive, so the strategy becomes markedly more concentrated and small changes in the ranking now change half its portfolio.
Fincanva does not recommend how many positions to hold — a wider or narrower cap is a mechanical consequence of where the cut falls, not a suggestion. See Is this financial advice?.
What happens when more instruments qualify than the cap allows?
The cap is applied at each rebalance, and when the selection produces more candidates than the cap allows, the strategy's ranking — the ordering its allocation method works from — decides which of them are kept; the rest are simply not bought. A screener still reports every instrument it matches, and the cap then trims that set down to the number the strategy is allowed to hold. Max positions is not the only limit on that path: a max-symbols cap can trim the match set to its most liquid names before the ranking ever sees it. So the cap changes what the strategy owns, not what its screener found.
A lower cap makes the strategy more concentrated and puts more weight on the ranking — explicit when the method is Ranking-based — because a smaller number of survivors is decided by a finer cut of the same ordering. A higher cap spreads the same capital over more instruments and leans less on the ranking. Both are mechanical consequences of where the cut falls — neither is a recommendation.
Is max positions a control when I pick the instruments myself?
No — this is the one place the cap is not something you set. When the selection is manual, Fincanva sets max positions to the number of instruments you picked, updated with every pick and removal, so the cap can never be the reason one of your own choices goes unheld. That covers a Single instrument strategy (one), a Multiple instruments strategy, and the Basket mode of a Full setup strategy; the field is not shown there, because you already answered "how many?" by choosing them. Leave the Basket for Screen or Compose and the value you last gave it there comes back — never the basket's count; a strategy that has only been on Basket since you opened it starts from the default. Pick more instruments than your plan holds in one strategy and the list is kept whole, but a blocking alert says so: the strategy is not saved and does not run until you remove instruments or move to a higher plan.
It remains a real control wherever the selection is by rule — Screen and Compose — where the number of qualifying instruments is not known in advance.
How high can max positions go?
As high as the lower of two ceilings: the 50 the field itself accepts, and what your plan allows — so a Free account tops out at 5, a Starter one at 10, an Advanced one at 25, and Ultimate and Professional both at 50. The engine imposes no user-facing maximum of its own; both ceilings are Fincanva's, and the app resolves your plan's before it accepts the value, so the number the field lets you save is a statement about your own account. A strategy already holding more than its plan allows is not edited or deleted — it reads Set aside until the value comes down or the plan covers it, which is plan compliance.