Mark as live is the command with which you declare which portfolio you’re actually trading. Among the many you generate and try in the Builder, there’s — at most — one that’s operational: marking it live freezes it, rules and composition together, in a protected space separate from the testing bench.
In simple terms: the Portfolio Rules tab is a lab, built for experimenting. But one of those portfolios is the one running on your real accounts, and you don’t want to risk touching it by mistake while trying a new rule. Mark as live solves exactly this: it fixes the operational portfolio at a stable, unchanging point. From that moment it lives on its own — Monitoring reads it without having to regenerate it every time, you stay free to keep analyzing other portfolios and rules, and the rules that generated it remain available to recall whenever you want.
An important premise. QANTHOS is an analysis, validation and discovery tool, not a financial advisor. “Mark as live” is a designation internal to QANTHOS: it declares which portfolio you consider operational for monitoring purposes. It doesn’t send orders, doesn’t move capital, doesn’t connect on its own to any broker. The decision to trade a portfolio, and its execution, remain yours and outside QANTHOS.
1. The problem: separating what you trade from what you experiment with
Builder users work by generating many versions: you change a filter, regenerate, compare; try a different correlation, regenerate again. It’s the right way to work — the tool’s value lies precisely in this fast cycle of hypothesis and verification. But there’s an underlying tension: while you experiment, one of those portfolios is the real one, the one you’re actually trading.
Without a dedicated mechanism, you’d have only two uncomfortable paths: leave the tab untouched once it holds the operational portfolio (and so not be able to experiment), or regenerate the operational portfolio every time you need to monitor it (slow and fragile, because one changed rule is enough to no longer get the same composition).
Mark as live removes this tension. Promoting a portfolio to operational detaches it from the lab: it’s fixed as-is in a separate space. The testing bench goes back to being entirely free for your analyses, while the operational portfolio stays stable and monitorable. From that moment on, the two worlds no longer interfere with each other.
2. What “Mark as live” does
The Mark as live command sits in Portfolio Rules’ bottom command bar. Pressing it, QANTHOS freezes two things together, as a point-in-time snapshot:
- the Portfolio Rules tab’s current rules — the entire configuration that produced the portfolio;
- the current composition — the operational rotation’s strategies and sizes, exactly as they are (not a recalculation).
The two are saved into a dedicated immutable slot, with a few metadata: an optional label you choose (to recognize it at a glance, e.g. “June 2026 rotation”), the marking timestamp, the number of strategies, and a fingerprint of the rules (see §4).
Only one live at a time. There’s a single operational portfolio at any given time. When you mark a new one, the previous live isn’t lost: it’s archived. This is a deliberate mechanism — “live” is by definition singular, and it’s what makes it unambiguous which portfolio Monitoring should follow.
Regenerate before marking. The composition doesn’t carry with it the rules that produced it: that’s why “Mark as live” explicitly freezes the rules+composition pair as it is right now. If you changed a rule after the last generation, regenerate the portfolio before marking it live, so the pair is consistent. The confirmation dialog reminds you of this openly.
3. What it’s for: three reasons
Marking a portfolio as live answers three concrete needs, all tied to the same idea — separating operations from experimentation.
1. Passing it to Monitoring without regenerating it every time. Once frozen, the operational portfolio is immediately available to the Monitoring module, which reads it from the live slot as-is. No need to rebuild it: composition and rules are already there, fixed. This is the difference between having the operational portfolio “at hand” versus having to recompute it every time you want to check its status.
2. Continuing to experiment without losing sight of what you’re trading. This is perhaps the most important benefit in daily work. After marking live, the Portfolio Rules tab goes back to being completely free: you can generate other portfolios, try different rules, compare alternatives — and none of it touches the operational portfolio. Monitoring keeps following what you’ve chosen to trade, while you explore in peace. The lab and production don’t interfere with each other.
3. Recalling the rules whenever you want — the Recall settings button. The rules that generated the live portfolio stay frozen and available. The Recall settings button — next to the live indicator in the status bar — brings them all back into the tab with one click: the entire generation set, i.e. the filters, the Money Management rules, the Portfolio Rebalancer, the Correlation stage, the rotation frequency and Min trades.
What this is for in practice: when the live rotation expires and you need to generate the new portfolio to put into operation, you don’t rebuild the configuration by hand — you recall it from the live one, regenerate on the updated data window, and mark the new composition live. It’s the natural cycle of a rotational portfolio moving forward in time.
Two ways to recall settings. The same generation rule set can be brought back into the tab two ways: with Recall settings from the portfolio marked live, or by recalling a previously saved Preset (the more complete presets restore, besides the filter list, also rotation, Money Management, Rebalancer and Correlation). The first starts from what’s currently operational; the second from a configuration you set aside for reuse.
4. Rules and composition: two distinct lifecycles
Worth understanding how QANTHOS treats the two things it freezes, because they have different fates.
The rules are immutable once marked live: they don’t change until you promote a new portfolio (which, as seen, archives the previous one). They’re the stable reference for “with which criteria am I operating”.
The composition, instead, is meant to move forward over time: at each real operational rotation, the live composition updates to the new selection, while the frozen rules stay the same. This update only happens for an actual live rotation — never during a Builder test. This is how the operational portfolio “walks” rotation by rotation without your tests influencing it.
The rules fingerprint. Among the live’s metadata, QANTHOS keeps a fingerprint (a hash) of the frozen rules. It’s used for a useful check: comparing the rules currently in the tab against the operational ones, to notice if you’ve drifted from them in the meantime. It’s a way to answer the question “am I still working on the same setup I marked live, or have I changed it?” without having to check by eye.
5. Three different things: Save, Snapshot, Mark as live
Three ways of “setting a portfolio aside” coexist in Portfolio Rules, and it’s easy to confuse them. They keep three different needs distinct.
| Command | What it keeps | What it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| Save / Load | The tab’s rules, as a configuration file | Reusing a configuration: you save it, reload it, start again from there. |
| Snapshot (💾 / 📂) | A generated portfolio, for comparison | Comparing multiple portfolios in the Comparison engine. |
| Mark as live | Rules + composition, frozen as operational | Declaring the one portfolio you’re trading, and feeding it to Monitoring. |
In short: Save is for rules you want to reuse, Snapshot is for comparing results, Mark as live is for fixing what’s operational. Only the latter creates the link with Monitoring.
6. Common issues and notes
The button won’t let me mark live. You need a non-empty portfolio: if the current composition has no strategies, QANTHOS won’t proceed. Generate a portfolio with at least one strategy first.
I changed a rule but the live didn’t change. That’s the intended behaviour: the live is immutable and isolated from tests. Changing rules in the tab doesn’t touch the operational portfolio. To update it you’d need to mark a new version live (which archives the previous one).
I marked live but the composition doesn’t match the rules I see now. You probably changed a rule after the last generation and didn’t regenerate before marking. “Mark as live” freezes the rules+composition pair as it was at the moment of the command: always regenerate before promoting, so the two parts stay consistent.
Where did the previous live portfolio go? Marking a new live archives the previous one, it doesn’t delete it.
7. An example workflow
A typical path, not a prescription.
- In the Portfolio Rules tab, build and GENERATE the portfolio you’ve decided to trade.
- Check the composition is the right one (it’s the last generated, consistent with the current rules).
- Press Mark as live, give it a recognizable label and confirm.
- Open Monitoring: it’ll find the operational portfolio already ready, no regeneration needed.
- Feel free to go back to experimenting in the Builder — generate other portfolios, try different rules: the live stays intact.
- When the live rotation expires and you need the new operational portfolio, press Recall settings (or recall a saved Preset): you bring back into the tab all of the live’s generation rules — filters, MM, Rebalancer, Correlation, frequency, Min trades.
- Regenerate on the updated window, check the Equity and Filters Analysis tabs, and mark the new composition live: the previous portfolio will be archived.
“Mark as live” is the bridge between the lab and operations. It gives what you trade a fixed point, leaving everything else free for exploration. As always, the choice of what to trade — and when to change it — remains yours to make, supported by QANTHOS’s analyses but never delegated to the tool.
8. To learn more
- Portfolio Rules — the command bar: GENERATE, Save/Load, Snapshot, Mark as live.
- Monitoring — the module that follows the operational portfolio over time (position reading, stop and take-profit tracking).
- Portfolio Comparison — Snapshot and the Comparison Engine, not to be confused with live.
- Builder tabs — Equity (for validating a portfolio before making it operational).