The positions summary table is the one-row-per-instrument view of a backtest's trading: every symbol the strategy ever held gets one row summarising its whole life in the simulation. It is a lifetime summary, not a list of trades — a symbol bought and sold five times still has one row, its results added together.
Also seen as: the By symbol table, per-symbol P&L
How does Fincanva handle it?
Included from Starter upwards. See what each plan includes.
- One row per symbol ever held, whether or not it is still held at the end of the run — a symbol that was traded and fully exited still has its row.
- Every money column is in the account's base currency, so rows are directly comparable to each other regardless of where each instrument trades.
- Rows are sorted by Total P&L, largest first, until you sort by another column; the table is searchable by symbol and loads more rows as you scroll.
- Above the table, four figures summarise the same data set: how many symbols were traded, how many of them ended profitable, the single best symbol by money, and the total trading costs — the sum of fees and slippage across every symbol.
- With no trading at all the table shows "No symbols in this backtest."
- Each row opens into the positions detail drill-down for that symbol.
What does each row of the positions summary tell you?
Each row reads left to right as one symbol's whole story, in money:
- Symbol — the instrument, with its ticker and name.
- Asset type — what kind of instrument it is.
- Gross — the symbol's trading profit or loss before costs.
- Costs — the trading fees plus slippage it paid over its life.
- Net — gross minus costs.
- Dividends — the dividend income it realized, counted apart from trading.
- Total P&L — the symbol's whole-life money result, dividends included.
- the symbol's whole-life money result
- its trading profit or loss before costs
- the fees and slippage it paid, so Gross minus Costs is Net
- the dividend income it realized
Because every figure is a lifetime total, the table answers "which instruments actually carried this strategy, and what did they cost me?" rather than "what happened on a given day".
Every one of those columns is money, which is what separates this table from the metrics table: that page reports the strategy's percentages, this one reports each instrument's cash result. The last column is therefore Total P&L — a money figure — and not the percentage that the metrics table calls total return.
What does it look like in practice?
A symbol's row reads: Gross 3,294 · Costs 12 · Net 3,282 · Dividends 129 · Total P&L 3,411. Read aloud: this instrument made 3,294 on price movement across every position the strategy took in it, paid 12 in fees and slippage to do so, kept 3,282 from trading, collected 129 in dividends along the way, and finished 3,411 up overall. A neighbouring row with a large Gross but a Costs figure many times bigger tells the opposite story in the same five numbers.