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Target exposure

Each system card on Systems shows a target exposure in dollars: the total size of book the strategy is aiming to hold for you.

Most people try to check it with mental arithmetic, get a number that does not match, and conclude something is wrong.

The obvious calculation is wrong

Section titled “The obvious calculation is wrong”

You would expect:

target = your equity x your leverage

That gets you the right order of magnitude, but it will not reconcile.

What actually produces the number

Section titled “What actually produces the number”

The strategy does not build one portfolio. It builds a rolling series of small portfolios, one per day, and holds each for a fixed window before it rolls off.

Day 1 portfolio  ─────────────────────────┐
Day 2 portfolio   ─────────────────────────┐
Day 3 portfolio    ─────────────────────────┐
        ...                                 │
Day 30 portfolio            ────────────────┘
                    ▲
              today's book = the sum of every window still open

At any moment you hold the combined positions of every portfolio still inside its window, on the order of twenty to thirty of them, netted symbol by symbol. That is why the strategy holds around twenty positions rather than one concentrated bet, why positions enter and leave gradually, and why the arithmetic does not reduce to a single multiplication.

Before the figure is published, the system also applies:

  • Per-symbol concentration caps, so no single symbol dominates, with the freed capacity redistributed.
  • Margin headroom, a buffer left unused so orders do not fail for want of collateral.
  • Regime scaling, which can halve the whole figure.

The published target has all of this already inside it.

What the slider does to it

Section titled “What the slider does to it”

The projected figure you see while dragging is the published target scaled by the ratio of your new setting to your current one. That is exact rather than an estimate: leverage is the one factor in the chain that is strictly linear, so scaling the finished number gives the same answer as recomputing from scratch, and keeps everything else, including regime scaling, intact.

Target versus actual

Section titled “Target versus actual”

Target exposure is what the strategy aims for. Gross exposure on Portfolio is what you hold. They rarely match exactly:

Reason Effect
Prices moved since the last run Exposure drifts continuously; target updates once a day
Orders were held Differences below the exchange’s minimum order size stay unfilled
A concentration cap binds The book cannot reach target in that symbol
Insufficient margin Additions could not fill

A gap of a few percent is routine. A gap that keeps widening across several days is worth looking at on Trade history.

When the figure is unavailable

Section titled “When the figure is unavailable”

The tile shows a dash when the target genuinely cannot be stated, for example before your first run has published one, or when no exchange is connected.

A dash means “we do not know”, deliberately different from $0. A zero would be a claim about your book. A dash is a claim about our knowledge of it.

Section titled “Related”