Nine red flags to check before you pay for any AI trading product

AI made trading products cheaper to build, and it made fake ones cheaper to build too. The same tools that let a solo developer ship a working scanner let anyone generate a polished landing page, a plausible equity curve, and a wall of testimonials in an afternoon. Since Robinhood launched agentic trading in May 2026, the space has filled up fast, and not everything in it is honest.

One disclosure before the checklist: I build one of these products, Coil (coil.trade). Read everything here knowing it was written by a vendor. That's fine, because the checklist doesn't ask you to trust me. It asks you to run the same nine checks on every product you're considering, including ours.

The promise: flags 1 to 3

1. Guaranteed or implied returns

Nobody can guarantee returns from trading. Not a fund, not a bot, not an AI agent. In most places, promising investment returns to retail customers isn't just dishonest, it's a regulatory problem. Watch for the soft version too: a steady monthly percentage, an AI that supposedly never loses, a rising chart with a rocket emoji next to it. A number presented as your likely future result is the oldest trick in this category, now with better graphics.

2. Income promises

Any product sold as passive income, a salary replacement, or a way to have AI pay your bills is misrepresenting what trading is. Trading is risk-taking. It can lose money in any week, month, or year, and a tool cannot change that. Software can help you follow a strategy with discipline; it cannot manufacture income. We wrote a longer piece on this at the passive income myth, but the short version is that the word income implies a reliability markets do not offer anyone.

3. No risk disclosure

Flip the first two flags around and you get the positive test: an honest vendor volunteers the downside. If you can't find the words "you can lose money" anywhere on a product's site, the site isn't being straight with you. Placement matters too. A disclaimer buried where nobody reads it is the legal minimum; risk stated next to the claims it qualifies is the honest version.

The evidence: flags 4 to 6

4. Unverifiable track records

A win rate with no methodology is a decoration, not a fact. A real track record answers four questions: what data, what time period, whether the results are in-sample or out-of-sample, and what simply buying and holding an index returned over the same window. Most marketing track records fail on the last one, because the comparison is unflattering. If you want to build the muscle for this, start with how to read a backtest and survivorship bias.

5. Screenshots as proof

Brokerage screenshots are trivially editable, and they don't even need to be edited to mislead. Post the winning trades, skip the losers, and the feed looks like genius. A screenshot proves that someone can take a screenshot. Treat them as advertising, never as evidence, no matter how green the numbers are.

6. Urgency and fake scarcity

Countdown timers, "only a few spots left", prices that supposedly double at midnight. Software has no scarcity; a download does not run out of stock. Manufactured urgency exists for exactly one reason: to stop you from doing what this article recommends, which is slowing down and checking. A legitimate tool will still be for sale next week, and its vendor knows that.

The operation: flags 7 to 9

7. No named builder

Who wrote the code? If you can't find a human name attached to the product, ask why. Anonymous vendors can vanish, rebrand, and relaunch with nothing at stake. A named builder has a reputation attached to every refund request and every bug report. A name isn't a guarantee of quality, but its absence is a guarantee of unaccountability.

8. Refund traps

Read the refund policy before you pay, not after. Warning signs: no policy at all, a blanket "no refunds on digital goods" with no way to evaluate before buying, or conditions you can't realistically meet. Checkout through an established payment processor with its own buyer protections is a good sign. A consumer software product that only accepts crypto is a bad one.

9. Asking for your broker password

This one is disqualifying on its own. No trading tool needs your brokerage username and password. Modern setups use scoped, revocable connections instead; Robinhood's agentic interface, for example, is built on MCP, the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting agents to tools, where credentials stay on your machine and access can be cut without changing your password. Anyone who asks you to type your broker login into their site or hand it to their support team can trade with your money, move it, or lock you out. If you want to see what a scoped setup looks like in practice, our guide to agentic trading on Robinhood walks through one.

How Coil scores against its own list

Fair question: does the vendor writing this pass? Here is where Coil stands on each check, stated factually so you can verify it rather than take it on faith.

• Named builder. Coil is built and maintained by Joey Fife, a solo developer, with his name on the site.
• Risk everywhere. Every page carries the disclosure that markets can lose money and that leveraged ETFs can lose value rapidly. This page carries it too, at the bottom.
• Public methodology. How the scanner ranks names, why the system buys pullbacks in leaders instead of chasing, and the research behind the ranking are laid out at /how-it-works. Research is labeled as backtested and shown next to its buy-and-hold benchmark, because backtests are not promises.
• No passwords. Coil runs inside your own AI agent against your own broker over scoped connections. Keys stay on your machine. It ships disarmed, and arming it for live trading is a deliberate human step.
• No traps. One-time purchase, no subscription, and a refund policy you can read before checkout, sold through a processor with its own buyer protections.

And the last reminder, which is really the whole article: we are a vendor. Verify us too. Every claim in that list is checkable from the outside, and you should check it the same way you would check anyone else.

FAQ

Are all AI trading products scams?

No. AI genuinely lowered the cost of building real tools, and some are built carefully. The problem is that it lowered the cost of faking them just as much. Treat every product, including ours, as unverified until it passes the checks in this article.

What is the fastest way to screen out a bad product?

Two instant disqualifiers: any guaranteed or implied return, and any request for your brokerage username and password. If either shows up, stop evaluating. No legitimate vendor does either.

How do I verify a trading track record?

Ask what data was used, over what period, whether the results are out-of-sample, and what buying and holding an index returned over the same window. A vendor who cannot or will not answer is showing you marketing, not evidence.