Coil vs Trade Ideas

Trade Ideas sits at or near #1 in almost every "best AI trading bot" list, and it earned the spot: twenty-plus years of real-time market scanning, an AI signal engine (Holly), and a free daily live trading room. Coil gets compared to it because both put AI on stock selection, but they are built for different jobs on different clocks. Trade Ideas is a day-trading signal platform you sit and watch; Coil is a long-only leadership-rotation engine your own AI agent operates, holding leaders for days to weeks. This page lays out the honest trade-offs — starting with the one that disqualifies Coil for a lot of Trade Ideas' audience.

Coil is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with Trade Ideas LLC. Everything below describes Trade Ideas from its public materials; any performance language is their marketing, not our claim. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security.

First, the honest disqualifier

If what you want is intraday day-trading signals — names to enter and exit inside a single session — Trade Ideas is genuinely the category leader, and Coil is not a day-trading tool at all. Coil never scalps, never fades an open, and has no intraday alert stream. It buys market leaders at structural entries and holds them for days to weeks, long-only. If your timeframe is measured in minutes, stop reading here and go evaluate Trade Ideas on its own merits. The rest of this page is for the buyer deciding between the two models — watched signals vs. an engine that runs itself.

What Trade Ideas actually is

Trade Ideas is genuinely good at what it does, and it's worth saying so plainly. It's a hosted, real-time scanning platform that has been in the market for over twenty years — one of the oldest names in retail trading software. The strengths are real:

• Real-time scanning that defined the category. Configurable scans and alert windows across the whole market, streaming as the tape moves — this is the core product and it is mature.
• Holly, the AI signal engine. By their description, Holly runs a large set of strategies against historical data overnight and surfaces the highest-scoring day-trade entries each morning, with suggested entries and exits. That's their characterization from their materials, not our claim about its results.
• OddsMaker backtesting. A built-in tool for testing a signal idea's historical odds before trading it.
• A free daily live trading room. Moderated sessions where traders watch the signals worked in real time — a real teaching resource, and free.
• Auto-trading on the top tier. Premium can route Holly's signals to a connected brokerage account automatically.

The model is subscription-only. As of July 2026 (check their site — pricing changes): TI Basic runs about $89/month billed annually (~$1,068/year), without Holly. Premium — Holly's AI signals, OddsMaker, and brokerage auto-trading — runs about $178/month billed annually (~$2,136/year), or roughly $254 month-to-month. For a full-time day trader whose fills improve by more than that, it's a defensible professional expense.

What Coil is — and isn't

Coil is a different shape on purpose. It is not a signal stream and there is nothing to sit and watch. It is one opinionated, finished engine. Its 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, sector-rotation phase, and overall market posture. A long-only engine then buys the leaders that score READY or SETUP at real entry windows, sizes by conviction, may accelerate the strongest names with leveraged ETFs at reduced notional (e.g. NVDA→NVDL, QQQ→TQQQ), ladders out on strength under structural stops set 4–14% below entry at volume-profile and Fibonacci levels, and raises cash when the pool is thin. It holds for days to weeks — long-only by design; a down market means cash plus defensive rotation into the macro book, never shorts or inverse funds.

Where it runs is the other difference. Coil is not a hosted platform and not an MCP server — it's software you download once and your own AI agent runs. It was built for an agent like Claude Code driving Robinhood's agentic accounts: the agent reads the scanner's publish and places orders through the broker's MCP connector, by rule. The code, the data key, and your brokerage credentials all stay on your machine. It ships with live trading OFF — you watch it plan in dashboard-only mode first and arm it deliberately. The discipline is baked in: it never buys FALLING names and never CHASEs extended ones, no matter what the tape is doing that morning.

The comparison

The last row is identical, and that's the honest center of any tool in this category: you are the account holder, and the losses are yours. Anything that implies otherwise is the thing to be careful of.

A signal firehose vs. an engine that runs itself

This is the real fork, more than any feature. Trade Ideas' output is a stream: scans fire, Holly surfaces entries, the window to act is measured in minutes, and a person has to be at the screen to judge each one and pull the trigger. That's not a flaw — it's the design, and for a trader who wants to be in the market all day, it's the right design. Coil inverts it. The scanner publishes scores, the engine turns them into a plan — what to buy, at what entry, with what stop, at what size — and your agent executes that plan on a schedule you set. The human moves from the trigger to the audit: you read what it did and why, in per-name scorecards, after the fact. If sitting at the screen is the part of trading you like, Coil takes that away from you. If it's the part you can't afford — a job, a life, a different timezone — that's the gap Coil fills.

Their AI suggests — Coil's engine decides

Holly's model is advisory: it proposes trades and, by their materials, you choose which to take (Premium's auto-trading can execute them for you through a connected broker). Coil's model is legislative: the rule-set decides, and the agent's job is to carry the decision out faithfully — never a FALLING name, never a CHASE, stop at the structural level, size by conviction, cash when nothing qualifies. Neither approach is smarter by nature. The advisory model keeps a human veto on every trade and demands a human's hours; the rule model removes the hours and the in-the-moment discretion together — including the discretion to make the impulsive trade. Which one you want depends on whether you trust your in-session judgment more than a fixed, auditable rule-set. Coil is built for people who answered "no" to that honestly. For how this differs from copy-trading bots and alert subscriptions generally, see Coil vs trading bots and signal services.

~$1,068–$2,136 a year, forever, vs. $29 once

The pricing difference isn't a discount — it's a different business model, and it's fair to both sides to say why. Trade Ideas operates real-time market-data infrastructure, a live trading room, and a hosted AI engine; a subscription is how that stays running, and a full-time day trader can reasonably recoup ~$2,136/year (as of July 2026) if the signals improve their fills. Coil has no servers doing your work — the software runs on your machine against a free data key — so it costs what software costs: $29 one-time (regular $39), and you keep it. Over five years the gap is roughly $5,000–$10,000 versus $29. But price the job, not the tool: if you need intraday signals, Coil at any price doesn't do the job. The comparison only matters for the swing/position timeframe, where paying every month for a screen you don't sit at is hard to justify.

Hosted vs. local

Trade Ideas runs on its own infrastructure and, for auto-trading, connects to your brokerage from its platform — convenient, always-on, nothing for you to run. Coil runs where you are: you (or a scheduled Claude agent) start it, and the code, the data key, and the broker credentials stay local — orders go through the broker's own MCP connector, and no third party sits between the strategy and your account. The cost of that is setup and a machine that has to be awake on schedule. Different people weight the convenience-vs-custody trade differently; both are legitimate.

Honesty about the numbers

We won't quote Trade Ideas' performance — Holly's win rates and the live room's results are their marketing to substantiate, not ours to repeat. 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 returns; the engine is newly live, and past performance does not predict future results.

How to choose

If you day-trade — or want to learn to, with a live room and a mature real-time scanner — Trade Ideas is the category leader and the honest recommendation, at a professional subscription price. If you want one validated, readable engine that scans the whole market, buys leaders only at real entries, holds for days to weeks, runs inside your own AI agent with credentials that never leave your machine, and costs $29 once, that's the gap Coil fills. For adjacent forks in the landscape, see Coil vs Tickeron and Coil vs Composer.trade.

Neither tool can promise a profit, and neither removes the risk — leveraged-ETF risk included. They're built for different traders on different clocks. When you know which one you are, the pricing page has the $29 one-time download.