Customize a preset strategy to fit the way you invest

Why start from a preset strategy

Four preset strategies are available: Long-term quality, Growing dividend, Value and Reasonable growth. Each one follows a major investment style, with common criteria and thresholds. They are examples, not methods to follow: adjusting them to the way you analyze a company is part of the work.

1. Duplicate the preset strategy

A preset strategy is read-only: you do not edit it, you duplicate it. On the Investment strategies page, each preset strategy has two buttons. “View” opens it read-only, with its criteria and rules. “Duplicate to adapt it” creates a copy in My strategies, named for example “Long-term quality (copy)”, and opens the editor on it. The copy is yours: you can change anything in it without touching the original.

You do not have to duplicate. When you create a sheet, you pick a preset strategy, used as it is, one of your own strategies or an empty strategy. A sheet created with a preset strategy stays linked to it, and its texts follow the app language. A sheet’s strategy is fixed at creation: for a sheet to follow your settings, create it with your copy.

2. Rename it

Your copy carries the original’s name followed by “(copy)”. Give it a name that means something to you, especially if you plan to have several: “Quality, cautious version”, “Dividend, Europe”. The name lets you filter the dashboard by strategy.

3. Change the thresholds

This is the most common adjustment. A few examples, to make in your copy:

• You mostly analyze manufacturers: the 40% gross margin in Long-term quality rules out almost all of them. Set the green threshold to 30% and orange to 20%.
• You want more headroom between earnings and the dividend: lower the maximum payout ratio in Growing dividend from 60 to 50%.
• The P/E of 12 in Value seems too strict for your market: raise it to 14, with orange up to 20.

For a minimum threshold, the orange threshold sits below the green one. For a maximum threshold, above it. Otherwise, the app flags the error and does not save the strategy until it is fixed.

4. Add or remove criteria

Remove a criterion you cannot fill in, or one that does not match the way you analyze a company: a short strategy you fill in completely is better than a long one. Add a criterion you are missing, for example FCF yield in a Quality strategy. Removing a criterion does not affect the values already entered in your sheets, nor their frozen versions.

5. Adjust the weights

In the preset strategies, every criterion has a weight of 1. If too much debt rules a company out in your eyes, set that criterion’s weight to 3: a red on that criterion will then count three times as much in the score.

6. Test a variant without breaking anything

Editing one of your strategies changes every sheet that uses it, immediately. Sheets created with the original preset strategy do not change: the original is never edited. To compare two settings, duplicate your strategy, edit the copy and create a sheet with each one. Versions already frozen keep the strategy as of their date: their history does not move.

Keep a record of your choices

Write in each criterion’s help text why you chose that threshold. In a year, when you reread a sheet, you will know whether the threshold came from a conviction or a provisional setting. The tutorial build your strategy covers each type of criterion in detail.