Taxonomies

There are three kinds of taxonomies that Capitally provides for most of the market-traded assets. You have the freedom to edit, expand, assign these to your custom assets, or even change the default assignments to better suit your portfolio needs.

Category

The category taxonomy is a nested set of investment categories such as Equity/Large-cap or Bonds/Government/Short. Each asset can be associated with only one category.

Stocks and Crypto are assigned to a proper *-cap category, unless we don't have market cap information.

Categories are nested with increasing specificity. Meaning, that Bonds category may contain any type of bond (or a mix of them), Bonds/Government narrows down to government bonds of any maturity, and Bonds/Government/Short is the most specific. We don't always have enough information to assign the most specific categories.

Category or asset type?

When an instrument does not sit where you expect in your allocation — a bond ETF showing up under equities, say — change its Category, not its asset type. The type governs which transaction types are available and how the asset is priced, and a bond ETF is still an ETF; instruments of each type may be handled differently in the future. Edit the asset and set the category to Bonds/... instead.

Category is single-select by design. Each asset belongs to exactly one, which is what lets allocation and returns be attributed precisely — Allocation/Aggressive can be compared against Allocation/Defensive cleanly, which the multi-weighted sectors and regions below cannot do.

Categories also work as an extension of the asset-type list. When you hold something Capitally has no type for — futures are the usual example — create it as a custom asset with the type Other and give it a category instead, either an existing one or one you add to the tree yourself. It then groups, filters and attributes returns alongside everything else.

Regions

The regions taxonomy is a nested set of world regions, like Developed/North America/United States. Each asset can be associated with multiple regions and weighted accordingly. The classification follows the MSCI model.

• Stocks are assigned to their country of origin.
• ETFs and Funds are assigned to multiple broader regions, like Developed/Europe (with the exception of US, Canada, UK and Japan).

Region Category

To address the attribution issue, assets are also assigned to predefined Region Categories, such as All World or APAC, with each asset belonging to only one class. This classification provides non-partial results that can be benchmarked.

• Assets are assigned to a class if their region weight matches the class within a ±10% precision.
• Predefined classes use MSCI World as a reference for allocation.
• If no class matches, the region or combination of regions covering at least 90% of the weight is used.

Sectors

The sector taxonomy is a nested set of sectors and industries, like Communication Services/Entertainment/Movies & Entertainment. Each asset can be associated with multiple sectors and weighted accordingly. We utilize the industry-standard GICS classification with minor adjustments to better fit the assets tracked in Capitally.

• Stocks and cryptocurrencies are assigned to a specific sector and industry.
• ETFs and Funds are assigned to broader sectors, such as Communication Services.

Clicking a top-level sector like Healthcare/*** expands it to show every sub-sector underneath, the same roll-up that works for nested categories.

To change the sectors on one asset, edit it and open the Taxonomies tab. To change many at once, select the assets in the Assets tab and set the sectors on the whole selection — the same bulk edit that works for categories and regions.

Updating Remote Assets

Market assets are refreshed on a weekly cycle, and that refresh covers exactly two things: the taxonomies (category, region and sector) and interest rates on bonds. Everything else — name, symbol, ISIN, country and the price source — is never changed for you. That is deliberate: your asset records stay under your control and nothing shifts under you between sessions.

You can turn the automatic update off altogether in Settings -> Analysis, or disable auto update of a particular taxonomy.

You can choose which taxonomies to update, and which you want to set manually

At any point you can update them manually. Simply open the Portfolio, navigate to Assets, select the assets you want to update and click "Update Taxonomies" from the Asset Taxonomies menu.

When a ticker changes

Because symbols are never updated for you, a company that changes its ticker leaves your asset on the old one. In most cases both symbols stay in the market database against the same ISIN, with the old one marked delisted, and Capitally flags that the symbol you are using is delisted so you can decide what to do: either mark the asset as delisted, or open its Prices tab and pick the new symbol from the dropdown. No transaction is needed and your history is preserved either way, because assets are tracked by an internal id rather than by their symbol. Ticker symbol or name changed walks through it.

Editing taxonomies

To edit a taxonomy, open it in Portfolio and click the ✏ Edit button. You can rename it or reorganize the structure within the tree.

If you rename a predefined taxonomy, like Bonds, any new assets you add will adopt your renamed version, allowing you to customize your organization method.