A universe is the set of instruments a screener or strategy is allowed to draw from. "All" means the whole market; you narrow it with filters — on country, exchange, index, sector, asset type and asset subtype — until only the instruments you want remain. Anything outside it can never be selected.
Also seen as: investable assets
Everything a strategy screens, ranks, or buys comes from this universe: the universe is the boundary, and the filters inside a screener then choose from within it.
The filters that narrow a universe were previously surfaced under the label "Restrictions"; that name is retired.
How does Fincanva handle it?
- "All" is the widest universe — the whole searchable market, including instruments that have since delisted, so a backtest is not limited to today's survivors.
- Each filter you add (country, exchange, index, sector, asset type, asset subtype) shrinks the universe, and combining filters narrows it further.
- A screener and its strategy draw only from the resulting universe; changing the universe changes what can be selected and can change results.
- A strategy's universe is what it picked, or, with nothing picked, its entry screener's universe. With nothing picked and no entry screener it has no universe at all: the instrument list reads No instruments, it buys nothing, and its backtest does not start — see Choosing the instruments your strategy holds.
What does it look like in practice?
You start from "All" — roughly the whole catalogue of tradable instruments, tens of thousands of them. You add a country filter for the United States and an asset-type filter for stocks. The universe shrinks to US-listed stocks only. From then on the screener ranks, and the strategy buys, solely within that reduced set — a non-US stock or an ETP can no longer appear, however well it would have scored.
Used in 41 pages
- What each plan includes · Account & security
- What Fincanva's data coverage figures count · Data & methodology
- The nine biases Fincanva helps you avoid · Getting started
- The Fincanva loop · Getting started
- Backtest a screener · Screeners
- Build a screener · Screeners
- Read your matches · Screeners
- Choosing the instruments your strategy holds · Strategies
- Attaching a screener to a strategy · Strategies
- Allocation and allocation method
- Asset-selection modes
- Asset type
- Backtest
- Confirmation bias
- Duplicate and Copy to Mine
- Data-quality bias
- Delisted
- Filter
- Filter taxonomy
- Fin
- Fin suggestions
- Index lists and point-in-time constituents
- Matches
- Max-symbols cap
- Mimicking
- Nested clustered optimization
- Plan compliance
- Screener
- Screener attach
- Screener backtest
- Screener execution and caching
- Seed universe
- Selection bias
- Sequential filtering and Top-N ranking
- Step by step
- Strategy
- Strategy alerts
- Survivorship bias
- SymbolsList
- Tradable and Not tradable
- Universe facets