Titan guide · 7 min read

How to set up your investment plan in Titan

Your Profile is where you write your investment plan: the rules you set for yourself. It takes five to ten minutes, and it is the screen that changes how everything else in the app behaves.

Why this screen matters

Most portfolio tools compare what you hold against the market. Titan compares it against the rules you decided on, which only works if those rules are written down somewhere. That is what this screen is for.

You can come back and change any of it whenever you want.

How the screen is organised

About Workshop: if you always analyse companies with the same sections, say “Business”, “Competition”, “Risks” and “Valuation”, you define them once here and every new thesis starts with them. One detail worth knowing: it only affects what you create from that point on, and it does not rewrite theses you already had.

Your investor manifesto

A free-text field where you write what you want to achieve and how you intend to achieve it.

It is there as a written commitment to yourself. Markets test everybody sooner or later, and the moment they do is exactly when breaking your own rules feels most reasonable. Having your intentions written in your own words, in the same screen as the rules, gives you something to come back to before you act on impulse.

Your goal and how you get there

Four fields that work as one block:

• Target amount and target date. How much you want to get to, and by when
• Regular contributions. How much you add to your broker, monthly or yearly. You can leave it at 0
• Target IRR. The annual return you need to reach that goal. You do not type this one in: Titan works it out from your current capital, your contributions and your target date

IRR stands for internal rate of return, and it is the right way to measure a portfolio you keep adding money to at different times, because it accounts for when each dollar went in and not just how much did.

Portfolio structure: six decisions

Six decisions, and most investors carry them in their head without ever having written them down. Writing them down is the exercise. The screen is the notebook.

They are easier to fill in in the order below, because each one builds on the previous, and that is not the order they appear in on screen. Worth following anyway the first time.

1. Initial position size range

How much of a company you can buy when you first enter, as a percentage of your total portfolio value. If your portfolio is $20,000 and you set a range of 2% to 5%, every new entry lands between $400 and $1,000. It keeps you from concentrating too much into a single idea.

2. Maximum size after growth

A position can grow on its own. If you buy 5% and that company appreciates while the rest do not, it will end up weighing more without you having bought anything.

Here you decide how far you let that go. Setting it at 10% means that one company can represent up to 10% of your whole portfolio, and it has nothing to do with the share price rising 10%.

3. Additional investment after a drop of

How far a position has to fall before you allow yourself to invest above your maximum. It is the controlled way out of your own rule, so you do not have to break it by feel at the worst possible moment, which is exactly when you will want to.

The reasoning behind it: if a company falls hard and your thesis has not changed, the upside from here is larger than it was when you first bought. This field is where you decide how large that drop has to be before you act on it.

4. Margin of safety

The gap you want between what you think a company is worth and what you are willing to pay for it. If you value it at 100 and work with a 30% margin, your entry price is 70. It is the cushion for when your estimate turns out to be optimistic.

5. Leverage

Investing with money borrowed from your broker on top of your own. Here you choose whether you allow it and up to what percentage. It multiplies what you gain and what you lose alike.

6. Dividends

Whether you want your portfolio to pay dividends, whether you would rather it did not, or whether you have no preference.

The choice says more than it looks: it shapes whether you build for periodic income or for pure compounding, and those lead to different companies and a different way of managing the portfolio over time. If you have not settled that yet, pick indifferent and come back to it.

There is more to it than fits here, and it has its own guide: dividends in Titan.

Countries and sectors

Part of the same block, and two decisions rather than one.

Where you accept investing. You pick which countries and which sectors are in and which are out. Sector means the type of business: technology, energy, healthcare, banking. Anything you leave out stays out.

How much you allow in each. On top of that, a cap on how much of your portfolio can sit in a single country or a single sector, so that what is allowed does not quietly become everything.

Think of it as your geographic and sector circle of competence. If you are not comfortable following companies from a given region or industry, there is little point leaving that door open.

What the plan is used for

This is what makes those ten minutes worth it:

• The Dashboard stops showing you only how much you hold and starts flagging where you have drifted away from your own rules.
• Optimization compares your current portfolio with the one that would come out of applying your plan. These are not buy or sell recommendations: they are the computation of the data you provided, plan included. For it to work you also need theses with target prices.

One piece of advice on filling it in

Do not try to nail it on the first pass. Put in the numbers that look reasonable to you today, live with them for a few weeks and adjust once you see how they behave against your real portfolio. A written, mediocre plan is more useful than a perfect one still in your head.