The satellite mental model

Most retail portfolios aren't designed. They accumulate. A tip here, a name a friend mentioned there, something that was up that week — and a year later you're holding 23 positions and you couldn't say why you own half of them. This lesson is about the structure Nordsight uses to stop that: a calm, boring core that does the heavy lifting, plus a few deliberate, named satellites around it. Every euro belongs to one or the other, on purpose.

The core/satellite model is old and well-worn, which is exactly why we like it. It isn't a clever trick. It's a filing system for your money that makes the question "why do I own this?" answerable for every single holding. If a position can't say which box it's in, it shouldn't be in the portfolio.

The two boxes

The split between them is a dial, not a rule. A common shape is 70–90% coreand the rest spread across a few satellites. Someone who wants a very hands-off portfolio might run 90% core and one small satellite. Someone with strong views and the stomach for them might sit nearer 70%. There is no "correct" number here, and this is illustrative, not a recommendation. The point is that you choose it deliberately and write it down, rather than drifting into whatever the last few impulse buys added up to.

Why naming a mandate matters

This is the part people skip, and it's the part that does the real work. A "mandate" is just a named satellite with three things attached to it. The act of writing those three things down, before you buy, is what turns a hunch into a position you can manage.

1. 1
   A thesis — why this exists

   One or two plain sentences. "European defense budgets are rising for structural, not cyclical, reasons, and I want exposure to that." If you can't write the thesis without pointing at a recent price move as the reason, you don't have a thesis yet.
2. 2
   A risk budget — how big it's allowed to get

   A hard size cap as a percentage of the portfolio. "This satellite never exceeds 8%." The cap protects you from your own conviction: even if you turn out to be right and it runs, a capped satellite can't quietly become the thing that sinks you when the cycle turns.
3. 3
   An exit rule — what would end it

   Written before you're emotionally attached. Not a price target presented as advice, but a condition: "I close this if the thesis breaks" (the budgets reverse, the structural story turns out to be a one-off) "or if it's been three years and the idea simply didn't play out." The exit rule is what stops a dead thesis from becoming a permanent resident.

Notice what naming does. An unnamed position has none of this. It has no cap, so it grows or shrinks by accident. It has no exit, so you hold it out of habit and hope. It has no thesis, so when it drops you have no way to tell "the idea is still good, this is just noise" from "the idea was wrong, get out." A name forces all three into existence. That's the whole trick.

Why not just one big basket?

You could hold one global ETF and nothing else. That's a perfectly good portfolio, and for many people it's the right one. The core/satellite model exists for the investor who wants to act on specific views and stay diversified — and who knows that, left unstructured, those two goals fight each other.

The structure separates the two jobs. The core handles "don't blow up, participate in the market, compound quietly." The satellites handle "I have a view and I want measured exposure to it." Keeping them in separate boxes means a satellite going wrong is a contained, expected event — you sized it knowing it might fail — rather than a hole in the middle of your retirement.

How this maps to Nordsight

Nordsight's mandatesfeature is this model made concrete. When you set up your portfolio, you declare a core and create named satellites. Each mandate is where you record its thesis, its size cap, and its exit rule — the same three things from above, just stored instead of scribbled on paper. Your eToro holdings (read-only; Nordsight never trades for you) get tagged against a mandate, so the app can show you, at a glance, which euros are doing which job.

That tagging is what makes the discipline enforceable instead of aspirational. If a holding doesn't belong to any mandate, Nordsight flags it — that's the "untagged / impulse" pile, and it's meant to be uncomfortable to look at. If a satellite drifts past its cap, you see it. The feature doesn't make the decisions; it just refuses to let the unmanaged middle hide.

Check yourself