Coil vs StockHero
Hosted no-code trading bots on a subscription vs. a published, scored board that never holds your keys — compared on key custody, cost, and how each frames its numbers.
StockHero and Coil both automate stock trading, but they sit at opposite ends of the design space. StockHero is a hosted bot platform: you pick a preset bot or rent a strategy from its marketplace, and StockHero's cloud runs it against your linked brokerage, around the clock, with nothing installed on your side. Coil is one finished, published board: a long-only scorer that scans the whole market, scores every name, and favors leaders at real entries — read in your browser, or served to your own AI agent, with Coil never holding your broker credentials. Neither is "better" in the abstract; they answer different questions. This page lays out the honest trade-offs.
Coil is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with StockHero. Everything below describes StockHero from its public materials; any performance language — including win-rate figures — is their marketing, not our claim. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security.
What StockHero actually is
StockHero is genuinely good at what it does, and it's worth saying so plainly. It's a cloud platform of no-code stock trading bots: you deploy a preset, configure one yourself from templates, or rent a strategy other users or the platform publish in a paid marketplace, and StockHero's servers execute it in your connected brokerage account. The strengths are real:
- Approachable. Preset bots can be running in minutes, with no code and no infrastructure of your own — probably the lowest barrier to entry in this category.
- Paper trading. A simulated environment lets you watch a bot behave before it touches real capital, which is exactly the right habit.
- A strategy marketplace. Renting a bot someone else built is a fast way to start, and the marketplace shows each bot's track inside the platform.
- Hands-on support. StockHero offers white-glove onboarding, and its user reviews are strong — around 4.5/5 on Trustpilot as of July 2026.
- Multi-broker. It connects to several brokerages, including TradeStation and Alpaca.
The model is a subscription. As of July 2026 StockHero advertises tiers around Lite $49.99/month, Premium $99.99/month, and Pro $159.99/month — roughly $500–$1,600 a year depending on tier and billing (check their site; pricing can change) — and marketplace strategy rentals are priced separately on top. For someone who wants hosted, hands-off automation with presets to lean on, that's a coherent product at a defensible price.
What Coil is — and isn't
Coil is the opposite shape on purpose. It is not a bot platform. There's no fleet of bots, no marketplace, nothing to rent, and nothing that trades on your behalf. It is one opinionated, finished board that does the ranking for you. The scanner scores every name across the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, and a macro book (bonds, income, gold and metals, commodities) for opportunity, entry-window (READY / SETUP / WAIT / CHASE / FALLING), hold-conviction, leadership, growth, sector-rotation phase, and overall market posture. The strategy behind the board is long-only: it favors the leaders that score READY or SETUP at real entry windows, accelerates the strongest names with leveraged ETFs at reduced notional (e.g. NVDA→NVDL, QQQ→TQQQ), and raises cash when the pool is thin. Coil Scanner ($12/mo or $99/yr) is the board read in your browser. Coil Live ($29/mo or $249/yr) serves the engine-grade board over MCP to your own AI agent, which places any order at your own broker. Coil never holds accounts or keys.
Coil's entry discipline is the point: it buys leaders at real entries and refuses the two ways people lose — it never buys FALLING names (falling knives) and never CHASEs extended names pinned at their highs. It is long-only by design; a "down" market means raising cash and rotating defensively into the macro book (bonds, gold, income), never shorting. Because the rule-set is one finished, validated thing instead of a shelf of bots, it can be checked rather than taken on trust: the method is written down, the board is published, the record is public, and the backtest is run point-in-time and survivorship-free. The rule-set stays frozen and fingerprinted; new strategy structure arrives only as a deliberately shipped, re-validated version.
The leveraged-ETF risk is real, whichever tool you choose. Coil accelerates its strongest leaders with leveraged ETFs at reduced notional — a 3x leveraged ETF triples the daily move, so a ~10% move in its index is roughly ~30% in the ETF before gaps and slippage, and leveraged ETFs decay on multi-day holds. They can lose value rapidly, including total loss of the capital you put in. No bot platform and no engine removes that. Coil's structural stops and rule-based exits aim to reduce single-day damage — they do not guarantee it, and a stop can gap straight through a price.
The comparison
| Question | StockHero | Coil |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | A platform of many bots — presets, templates, and a paid marketplace of rentable strategies | One ready board — scans the market, scores every name, favors leaders long-only |
| Where it runs | StockHero's cloud, 24/7, nothing installed on your side | Scanner is hosted and read in your browser; Live is served over MCP to your own AI agent, which places orders at your broker |
| Who holds broker keys | You generate broker API keys and store them with StockHero; their servers trade your account | You do; Coil never holds accounts or keys |
| Strategy source | Many bots of varying provenance — you pick, configure, or rent | One validated rule-set, published whole, with the method written down |
| Testing before capital | Paper trading inside the platform | Research backtest published; the record is public and the board is readable before you act on it |
| Adapts to your fills | A bot runs its configured logic until you reconfigure or swap it | No per-account tuning — one served rulebook, the same for every subscriber |
| How performance is framed | Win rates and per-bot marketplace stats (their materials cite figures like ~90% win rates — their claim, not ours) | Full-period backtest next to SPY, with max drawdown and an unflattering rider attached |
| Cost model | Subscription — as of July 2026 roughly $49.99–$159.99/mo by tier (~$500–$1,600/yr), plus marketplace rentals; check their site | Subscription: Scanner $12/mo or $99/yr; Live $29/mo or $249/yr; cancel any time |
| Who owns the risk | You | You |
The last row is identical, and that's the honest center of any tool in this category: you are the account holder, and the leveraged-ETF total-loss risk is yours. Anything that implies otherwise is the thing to be careful of.
What a win rate does — and doesn't — tell you
StockHero's marketing leads with win rates; figures like "~90% win rate" appear in its public materials. That is their claim, not ours, and we have no basis to dispute the arithmetic behind it. The point worth making is statistical, not an accusation: a win rate, on its own, is an incomplete statistic, and it's incomplete in three specific ways.
- It says nothing about magnitudes. A strategy that takes many small wins and occasional large losses can win 90% of its trades and still lose money overall — taking profits early and holding losers longer produces exactly that shape. The number you need alongside it is the size of the average win versus the average loss.
- It has no benchmark. Winning 90% of trades means little if simply buying and holding SPY did better over the same window with zero effort. Any performance figure only becomes evidence of edge when it's placed next to what doing nothing would have earned.
- It says nothing about drawdown. Two strategies with identical win rates can have wildly different worst stretches — and the worst stretch is what decides whether a real person keeps running the system.
So when you evaluate any tool — a StockHero bot, Coil, or anything else — ask for full-period returns against a benchmark and a maximum drawdown, not a win rate. Our guide on how to read a backtest walks through the full checklist. That framing is also why Coil publishes its numbers the way it does, below — including the parts that don't flatter it.
Their cloud vs your own account
StockHero's bots run on StockHero's servers. To trade your account, you generate API keys at your brokerage and store them with StockHero — standard practice for hosted platforms, and it buys real convenience: always-on execution, no machine to keep awake, no local setup at all. The trade-off is equally plain: a third party's infrastructure holds credentials that can place trades in your account, and you're trusting their security posture as well as their code. Coil inverts it. Coil never holds accounts or keys: the Scanner is a board you read, and with Live your own agent (for example a scheduled Claude agent driving your broker's connector) reads the board and places orders at your broker on a cadence you control. That means more setup on your side, but no third party sits between the strategy and your account. Different people weight that convenience-vs-custody trade differently; both positions are legitimate.
Honesty about the numbers
We won't quote StockHero's bot statistics as evidence in either direction — they're per-bot marketplace figures under their methodology, and you should read them on their site with the same checklist you'd apply to ours. For Coil, here are the figures, framed exactly as they should be. In a point-in-time research backtest (2017–2026 H1, survivorship-free with delisted names included, next-open fills, costs modeled), the leadership-rotation backbone Coil's scoring is built on compounded +638% versus SPY's +282%, with a shallower worst drawdown (−23% vs −32%) and a positive result in 9 of 10 years (worst −1%, in 2018). Read the honest rider with it: through the end of 2025 it ran roughly even with SPY at about one-third less drawdown — the outperformance concentrates in leadership regimes (2025 +51%, 2026 H1 +86%). These are research figures, not live or client results; the engine is newly live, and past performance does not predict future results.
| Year | Coil (research) | SPY |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | +17% | +20% |
| 2018 | −1% | −7% |
| 2019 | +7% | +30% |
| 2020 | +22% | +19% |
| 2021 | +6% | +28% |
| 2022 | +13% | −16% |
| 2023 | +10% | +23% |
| 2024 | +12% | +27% |
| 2025 | +51% | +17% |
| 2026 H1 | +86% | +10% |
| Cumulative | +638% | +282% |
| Max drawdown | −23% | −32% |
Read it as a hypothesis, not a promise. This is a research backtest of the scoring backbone, not a live or client track record — the engine is newly live, and the rider above matters: most of the edge concentrates in leadership regimes, and it can run merely even with the index for long stretches. On thin days the engine simply raises cash rather than force a trade; any uncommitted cash earns whatever your broker's variable sweep pays (for example, Robinhood Gold quoted ~3.35% APY as of early 2026 — the broker's yield, variable, not paid by Coil, and not risk-free). Coil does not generate or promise that yield.
How to choose
If you want hosted and hands-off — no local setup, preset bots you can deploy in minutes, paper trading in the same tab, and support that walks you through it — StockHero is a strong, approachable choice, and its reviews reflect that. If you want self-custody and a board you can check — one validated, readable rule-set that scores the whole market, favors leaders only at real entries, publishes its method and its record, and never holds your keys — that's the gap Coil fills. For adjacent comparisons, see Coil vs Composer.trade (a no-code strategy builder rather than a bot shelf), Coil vs Tickeron, and the broader Coil vs trading bots and signal services; for the agent and broker setup, the Claude + Robinhood agentic trading guide walks it through.
Neither tool can promise a profit, and neither removes the leveraged-ETF risk. They're built for different temperaments. When you've decided which you are, the Scanner is $12/mo or $99/yr and Live is $29/mo or $249/yr.
One finished board, no bots to rent
The Scanner scores the whole market about every 5 minutes in market hours, and you read it in your browser. You hold the keys, the capital, and the risk.
Read the board — from $12/moCoil Scanner is a hosted research tool; Coil Live serves the board to your own AI agent, which trades through your own brokerage account and capital. It is long-only and not investment advice, not a managed account, and not a signal service. Leveraged ETFs, where the engine uses them, can lose value rapidly, including total loss. All performance figures are research backtests — point-in-time and survivorship-free, not live or client returns; past performance does not predict future results.