User Guide & FAQ

The Dashboard provides an immediate overview of market conditions, important signals, and relevant news. It centralises alerts, upcoming events, sector movements, and portfolio performance. Its purpose is to allow you to understand in seconds what deserves your attention and what actions could be considered.

Each Security receives one of five signals based on its composite score and market context:

If you have entered your purchase price for a watchlist stock and the current market price is below that price (you are at a loss), InvestCompass automatically adjusts SELL and PARTIAL SELL signals to NEUTRAL. This prevents you from acting on a short-term negative signal when selling at a loss may not be in your best interest. The original signal is always shown alongside the adjusted one.

The composite score (0–100) is built from four weighted pillars:

Two predefined profiles configure scoring weights and moving average periods in one click:

The system monitors five macroeconomic signals:

These signals determine one of 4 economic regimes (Expansion, Slowdown, Recovery, Recession) which guides the macro context and exposure limits. During a recession, the system becomes more conservative.

The VIX (CBOE Volatility Index) measures the market's expectation of near-term volatility:

The sector table tracks 11 GICS sectors for both S&P 500 and S&P/TSX. For each sector you can see the Trend (price action vs. moving averages), Momentum (rate of change and RSI), and 52-Week Range (where the current price sits between its annual low and high).

Rotating into sectors with Uptrend + Bullish momentum and away from Downtrend + Bearish sectors improves risk-adjusted returns over time. The summary card at the top of the page gives you an instant read on overall market posture.

Add stocks you are monitoring. For each stock you can set a Purchase Price (your cost basis, used for signal modulation) and a Target Price Range (your entry minimum and exit maximum). If you have not yet purchased the stock, leave the price blank — the standard signal will apply without modulation.

Virtual Portfolio — Simulate trades with paper money to test strategies and track hypothetical performance without risk. Real Portfolio — Log your actual transactions with date, quantity, and price. The system calculates your current P&L and applies live signals to your holdings.

The Fundamental Comparison module lets you compare up to 5 stocks side-by-side across seven key financial metrics. Enter any ticker symbol and add it to your comparison set. For each stock you see: P/E, EV/EBITDA, Price-to-Book, Gross Margin, Net Margin, ROE, and Revenue Growth — along with year-over-year deltas for the margin metrics.

A second table shows how each stock compares to the average of its sector peers for P/E, Gross Margin, Net Margin, and ROE. Green means the metric is favorable relative to the sector average; red means it lags. Each stock also receives a bilingual text summary highlighting its relative strengths and weaknesses.

The Market Overview page gives you a real-time picture of the overall market environment. It shows live indices for the S&P 500 and S&P/TSX, commodities and FX rates, the VIX zone (Clear Skies / Dark Clouds / Storm Warning), the macroeconomic regime (Expansion, Slowdown, Contraction…), market valuation (P/B ratio), and macro diagnostics such as breadth, yield curve, and risk-on/risk-off ratios.

The system covers both S&P 500 (US) and S&P/TSX (Canadian) markets and updates signals regularly based on real-time and fundamental data.

The InvestCompass Lists section bundles five ready-to-use lists, shared across all users and refreshed once per day at the market close: Top 50 Dividend S&P 500, Top 50 Dividend S&P/TSX, Top 50 Fundamental S&P 500, Top 25 Fundamental S&P/TSX, and iShares Sector ETFs (US + CA). Each list reuses our scoring engines (fundamental, sector, technical) to rank the best securities by the chosen criterion.

The first four lists scan the full market universe (~500 tickers for SPX, ~250 for TSX). The first user of the day triggers a calculation that takes 1–2 minutes; the result is then cached globally and served instantly to every user until the next market close (4:30 PM ET), at which point the list is automatically refreshed once per day. For that reason no list is loaded automatically: you must explicitly pick the list you want to trigger the computation. The iShares Sector ETFs list covers only ~30 ETFs and loads in a few seconds.