Strategy allocations

5 min read · updated 2026-08-02

SleeveFolio can run several strategies at once. The Strategy allocations table on Settings → Strategies lists every strategy in your mix with the percent of your funds it trades; whatever you leave unallocated is a cash reserve that is never traded. Each strategy trades only its own slice of the account, ranking the symbols it may trade with its own factor weights and buying and selling within its own share. Which symbols those are depends on the strategy: one that is following a published list ranks only that list’s symbols in your universe plus your hand-added picks, while one that isn’t ranks your whole universe — so one strategy can be selling a symbol its list dropped while another strategy’s list keeps it.

How the mix works

Each row pairs a strategy with a percent and shows the dollar value that percent works out to at your current account value. Add a strategy from the Strategy library (one click: + Add to your mix), then set its share here. The percents may add up to less than 100 — the remainder is the cash reserve, shown on its own row (“unallocated · never traded”) — but never more: the footer badge flips from ✓ sums to 100% to an over-allocated warning, and an over-allocated split won’t save.

Inside its slice, a strategy plays by all the usual rules: your sleeve budgets (the stocks / crypto / cash split) and caps apply within the slice, and your account-wide ceilings still hold overall. Every order the engine places is tagged with the strategy that placed it, and each strategy sells only what it bought — positions you opened by hand are never sold by a strategy’s signals.

Unfunded strategies

A strategy sitting at 0% is unfunded: it still ranks your universe and shows up in reports, but it stops buying — it has no money for new positions. Holdings it already has stay managed: its protective sells (stop-loss, take-profit trims, and sell signals) keep working until those holdings are gone. That can be exactly what you want: a parked strategy you plan to fund later, or a strategy where 0% simply switches off new buying. So SleeveFolio flags it rather than treating it as an error — an amber ⚠ UNFUNDED chip on its allocation row, and ⚠ IN MIX · UNFUNDED on its library card. The footer badge still reads as valid, just with a note of how many strategies sit at 0%. The flag clears the moment you type a non-zero percent.

The first time you add a strategy while setting the split by hand, a one-time tip appears under the new row with a single suggested split — an even share across your strategies, leaving your cash reserve untouched. Apply suggestion only fills in the percent fields: nothing is saved until you press Apply, and Discard puts the old numbers back. Dismissing the tip (✕) hides it for good; the amber flag itself is state, not coaching, and always shows while a strategy sits at 0%.

With auto-allocation on (see below), none of this comes up: a just-added strategy gets its share of funds immediately.

The Risk & caps switch

Every allocation row carries a switch with two positions:

  • strategy-managed (the default): the strategy’s built-in protection — its own stop-loss and take-profit, where the preset carries one — applies to its slice, and the position caps for that slice tighten to match how conservative or aggressive the strategy is. Always within, never above, your account-wide ceilings.
  • global caps: your Risk & Caps apply exactly as-is, and the built-in protection is off for that slice.

A stop-loss you set yourself on Settings → Strategies is an account-wide backstop either way: it covers every slice (and positions you opened by hand), and where a strategy carries its own built-in stop-loss, yours wins.

Auto-allocation

By default, SleeveFolio sets the split for you. The Strategy allocation card on Risk & Caps holds an Auto-allocate between strategies switch (on for new accounts; accounts created before it became the default keep whatever they chose), an allocation preference, a cash reserve floor, and a preview of the current split. With it on, your split updates immediately whenever its inputs change — you turn it on, pick a different preference, adjust the floor, or add or remove a strategy — so a just-added strategy gets its share of funds right away instead of sitting at 0%. While automatic trading is on, each daily trading run (the once-a-day run shortly after the US market opens) starts by re-checking the split, folding in how each slice has been doing; to keep the mix from twitching, that re-check only shifts the split when its target drifts more than 5 percentage points. With automatic trading off there is no daily re-check — your split changes only when you change its inputs. Trading itself follows at the next daily trading run — changing the split never places an order on the spot.

The preference sets the tilt:

PreferenceTilt
ConservativeDefensive: strategies built on steadier prices lead, with a larger cash reserve
BalancedSpread across styles by return earned for the ups and downs endured, with a moderate cash reserve
AggressiveLed by price-strength (momentum) strategies, with a minimal cash reserve

The cash reserve floor is your hard minimum: auto-allocation never dips the reserve below it, whatever the preference would otherwise choose.

Removing a strategy

Removing a strategy from your mix leaves its holdings in place: nothing is sold. Those positions simply stop being traded by that strategy’s signals; a stop-loss you set yourself still protects them, and you can always sell them by hand or via the kill switch. You always keep at least one strategy in the mix — the table won’t let you remove the last one. A custom strategy(one you built by hand rather than picked from the library) can’t be removed at all, because the library has no card to add it back from — set its allocation to 0% instead and it simply stops buying.

Where things live

  • Settings → Strategies: the allocations table (percents, dollar values, the per-row Risk & caps switch, remove), the Strategy library, per-strategy tuning, and the auto-execute switches. While automatic universe management is on, each row also shows which published list the strategy follows — a small tag under the strategy name (with an amber “paused” note when that list’s agreement needs a fresh review, and a quiet “not following a list” for rows with tracking off). The tag is read-only: clicking it jumps to that strategy’s row on the Universe page, where lists, tracking, and agreements are managed.
  • Risk & Caps: the Strategy allocation card — the auto-allocate switch, preference, cash reserve floor, and the current-split preview — alongside your budgets and caps. (Looking for the trading universe? Its home is the Universe tab.)