The investment 'universe' is the term used to define the set of assets to research and trade.

There are simply too many securities in the world to monitor, so we must narrow our focus to a subset of these. We can filter by asset class by choosing to only invest in stocks and exclude bonds, currencies, and commodities for example. We can also filter by geography, exchange, market capitalisation or liquidity for example. Our choice of universe dictates a lot about the potential risk and return of our investments. Each investor has different preferences on what kind of securities they want to research. This could be based on what country they live in or their particular interests and/or experience.

Let's take a look at how we construct our top-level universe of equities at STRATxAI. We apply the following filters by default: