Although this question might seem to be trivial, you should clearly understand that your portfolio consists of open positions (stocks you possess).

 

Your portfolio AND available cash at your brokerage account make up your Total Capital - major indicator for every investor.

 

Example: Lets say that you have $10,000 invested into stocks and plan to invest another $5,000, your Total Capital is $15,000. PortfolioRunner will give recommendations based on calculations made considering your available cash. Sure, you will be able to adjust this amount at any time. Buying stocks will deduct available cash and selling will increase the amount.

With PortfolioRunner you can manage multiple portfolios simultaneously. This will allow you to experiment with different sets of stocks and to check a quality of predictions you made yourself or any other forecasts you want to try out. It is also useful to vary strategy choice and risk management settings. 

 

Auto simulation is the portfolio option that you can enable in order to allow PortfolioRunner performing trades in automatic mode. Auto simulation, of course, is the tool for virtual portfolios. After enabling this option and until it is disabled all trades at the PortfolioRunner (but NOT in reality!) will be executed without prompting a user.

 

So you may want to create virtual portfolio in accordance with any of your predictions, enable auto simulation and then leave it for some days, weeks or even months. PortfolioRunner will automatically use generated recommendations and execute them in accordance with preferences you set up. In some time you may look at the results and it may help you to make conclusions and better understand the market, or even build your own strategy! 

 

Auto simulation, for example, is used in Demo account portfolios and also in PortfolioRunner support team portfolios that are monitored in order to improve existed and check the quality of new strategies.

 

The underlying concepts of PortfolioRunner strategies is an essence of economical and mathematical research & analysis that has been going on for more than 5 years. Technically, a strategy is a set of algorithms developed by the PortfolioRunner team or third party strategies generators and integrated into a unique decisive engine. This means that a user cannot affect any calculations performed within a chosen strategy, but has access to and can modify vital parameters that govern search for “good” stocks to buy and monitors open positions to sell at the right moment. 

 

To receive recommendations at PortfolioRunner, you have to designate one or several strategies for your portfolio.

PLEASE NOTE, THAT YOU ARE NOT LIMITED TO USE RECOMMENDATIONS GENERATED BY PORTFOLIORUNNER STRATEGIES. ANY BUY SIGNALS COULD BE PERSONALIZED FOR YOUR PORTFOLIO. 

 

The result of calculations performed by the engine depending on a strategy, recommendation’s filter and risk management settings is a set of recommendations (stock symbols) to buy or sell. THIS SET OF RECOMMENDATIONS IS UNIQUE AND PERSONALIZED FOR EACH AND EVERY USER, RESULTING FROM THE USER'S RISK MANAGEMENT SETTINGS AND ALSO VOLUME AND STRUCTURE OF PORTFOLIO ITSELF. 

 

By default you receive recommendations for a current date, e.g. recommendations that were generated based on stats ending last trade day data. However, you can use recommendations that were generated earlier but still applicable for your strategy and risk management settings - Actual recommendations.

 

Strategies on their own do not contain any filters referred to arrays of stocks. This means that strategy generates buy recommendations for a full set of stocks, satisfying strategy’s logic, and these can be dozens of symbols. To limit number of recommendations and make them most “convenient”, you can implement your own filter or use one of pre-defined filters.

 

Risk management is the most important part of overall portfolio management. Moreover, together with recommendations filter, it encapsulates your individual vision of portfolio behavior. While recommendation filter helps to chose “right” stocks, risk management, in fact, defines particular quantity of those stocks to buy or sell, which means it influences significantly on your portfolio structure. You can use one of pre-defined risk management settings or set your own ones, more or less speculative or protective.