Coil vs Trayd (trayd-mcp)
An open-source Robinhood-via-Claude execution bridge vs. a pre-built, validated, long-only engine that scans the whole market — closest architectural cousins, very different products.
Of everything we get compared to, Trayd (trayd-mcp) is the closest architectural relative. Both projects let an AI agent place real trades in a Robinhood account using the Model Context Protocol. If you've used Trayd and you're wondering how Coil is different, the honest answer is: they sit at opposite ends of the same pipe. Trayd is the bridge. Coil is the engine that runs over a bridge like it. This page is a fair comparison of what each one is — and isn't. None of it is advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security.
To be clear up front: Coil is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Trayd or its authors. Trayd is open-source software with its own community; we describe it from its public project, and any capability we attribute to it is theirs, not a claim we make on their behalf.
What Trayd actually is
Trayd (the trayd-mcp project) is a free, open-source MCP server that exposes Robinhood to a Claude agent so you can trade in natural language — "buy 10 shares of NVDA," "show me my positions," "close everything" — often driven through a recurring runner like /loop. It's a flexible execution bridge: it gives an agent hands on your account. What it deliberately does not ship is a strategy. There's no validated edge in the box, no backtest harness, no risk-ladder, no opinion about what to trade or when. You bring — or author — the rules yourself.
Trayd's genuine strengths
These are real, and we're not going to pretend otherwise:
- Free and open-source. No price, full source. You can read every line, fork it, and change anything.
- Hackable and general-purpose. Any ticker, any side, any logic you can express to an agent. It isn't boxed into one approach.
- Multi-account / multi-asset reach. Because it's a thin bridge, it doesn't constrain you to a single strategy or a single account the way a fixed engine does.
- Developer-friendly. If you're comfortable writing and testing your own strategy, a bridge plus an agent is a powerful, cheap foundation.
A capable developer can build a great deal on top of Trayd for nothing but their own time. That's a legitimate path, and for some people it's the right one. If you want to understand the underlying pattern — an agent with broker hands — our explainer on whether Claude can trade stocks and the broader Claude + Robinhood agentic trading guide cover it without selling you anything.
What Coil is
Coil is not a bridge. It's the layer that's missing from a bridge: a pre-built, validated, long-only strategy engine. It runs over the same kind of plumbing — built for Claude as a scheduled agent, built for Robinhood (or any equivalent broker MCP) — but what you're buying is the part that's hard to get right: the market scan, the rules, the safety rails, and the reproducible evidence.
- A whole-market scan, not a single ticker. A 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 market posture.
- A specific, disciplined strategy. Long-only: it buys leaders scored READY or SETUP at real entry windows, refuses FALLING names (falling knives) and refuses to CHASE extended names, and accelerates the strongest leaders with leveraged ETFs at reduced notional. Exits are deterministic — every position carries a structural protective stop and ladders out under trailing stops.
- A safety core, not a vibe. An immutable safety core governs everything: account whitelist, position caps, a drawdown ladder keyed to your equity high-water mark, and a kill switch — and it fails closed, shipping disarmed. This is the part you'd otherwise have to design, test, and trust yourself.
- A research-backtest harness + a safety self-test suite. The same harness the developer uses ships with the engine: point-in-time and survivorship-free, with delisted names included, so the numbers aren't flattered by hindsight — plus self-tests covering the safety spine, the strategy, and the integrity checks. Run them yourself before a dollar moves.
- Local self-tuning, on a leash. At each close a local pass leans position sizing (only sizing) toward what has been working in your own closed round trips — by book and buy-score tier, hard-clamped to about 0.55×–1.35× and shrinkage-weighted, with every tilt written to a readable audit trail. It learns from live round trips only, the validated rule-set stays frozen and fingerprinted, and new structure ships only as re-validated versions. Why that matters is covered in self-tuning vs static trading bots.
- One-time $29. You download the full engine — scanner, dashboard, engine — and own it (regular $49). No subscription, no tiers; new versions are announced on coil.trade and installed manually when you want them.
The caveat that applies to both, equally: Coil accelerates its strongest leaders with leveraged ETFs at reduced notional, and leveraged ETFs can lose value rapidly, including total loss of the capital you put in. A 3x leveraged ETF can decay on multi-day holds. A bridge like Trayd gives an agent the ability to act; an engine like Coil gives it rules to act on — but neither removes market risk. With Trayd, an under-tested rule you wrote can trade exactly as confidently as a good one. With Coil, the rails reduce single-day damage but stops can still gap straight through a price. In both cases you own the keys, the capital, and the risk.
Bridge vs engine — the comparison
| Question | Trayd (trayd-mcp) | Coil |
|---|---|---|
| What it fundamentally is | Execution bridge — agent hands on Robinhood | Strategy engine that runs over a bridge like it |
| Trading rules | You bring or author them — none in the box | Pre-built, long-only leader-rotation strategy ships with it |
| What it trades | Whatever you point it at | Scans the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 & a macro book; buys the leaders it scores |
| Validated edge / evidence | None out of the box — depends entirely on your rules | A survivorship-free research backtest with an honest rider; treat as hypothesis, not proof |
| Backtest harness | Not included — you build your own testing | Research-backtest harness, point-in-time and survivorship-free, included |
| Risk controls | Whatever you implement | An immutable safety core: whitelist, position caps, a drawdown ladder, kill switch — built in |
| Integrity checks | Up to you | A safety self-test suite + a frozen, fingerprinted rule-set |
| Adapts to your fills | You code it if you want it — a bare bridge tunes nothing | A local EOD pass tunes sizing (only sizing) to your own closed trades — hard-clamped 0.55×–1.35×, logged, offline; new structure ships as re-validated versions |
| Scope | Any ticker, any side, multi-account | Long-only, market-wide by design |
| Open source / hackable | Yes — free, fully readable, forkable | No source license; engine is readable and yours to keep, not a fork base |
| Price | Free | $29 once (regular $49) — no subscription |
| Who owns the risk | You | You |
The last row is identical on purpose. In both worlds you are the account holder and the leveraged-ETF total-loss risk is yours. The real difference is everything above that line: with Trayd you supply the strategy and the safety; with Coil they're the product. That includes the learning: a bare bridge has nothing to adapt until you build it, whereas Coil's copy already tunes its own position sizing to your fills — size-only, bounded, auditable, and offline — with no code from you.
The honest numbers — and why they're a hypothesis
Trayd doesn't advertise a track record, because it's a bridge — there's nothing to track until you write a rule. Coil does publish figures, and we'd rather over-disclaim them. Everything below is a research backtest, never live or client results: point-in-time S&P membership, delisted names included, next-open fills, costs modeled, 2017 through 2026 H1. In it, 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).
And the rider that keeps it honest: through the end of 2025 the backbone 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 results; the engine is newly live, and past results do not predict future ones. On no-setup days it raises cash; idle cash earns the broker's variable sweep (for example, Robinhood Gold quoted ~3.35% APY in early 2026 — that's the broker's yield, variable, not paid by Coil, and not risk-free).
Read it as a hypothesis, not proof: a survivorship-free decade is a real result, but the rider matters — the edge concentrates in leadership regimes and can run merely even with the index for years. The point of comparing to Trayd isn't that Coil's numbers beat Trayd's — Trayd has none to publish — it's that a validated, evidence-backed strategy is exactly the thing a bare bridge leaves you to build and prove yourself.
How to choose
If you're a developer who enjoys authoring and testing your own logic, wants any ticker and any side, and values free, forkable, open-source code, Trayd is a genuinely good foundation — and you should use it without guilt. If instead you want the validated strategy, the deterministic exits, the circuit-breaker ladder, and a reproducible backtest harness handed to you for the price of a sandwich — so you're not betting real capital on rules you've never stress-tested — that's the gap Coil is built to fill. The two even compose: Coil runs over the same agent-plus-broker pattern a bridge like Trayd demonstrates.
Neither tool is "guaranteed better," and neither can promise a profit. For the wider field, see Coil vs trading bots and signal services; when you've decided which kind of builder you are, the pricing page has the $29 one-time download.
The strategy a bridge leaves out
Trayd gives an agent hands. Coil gives it a market-wide scan, validated long-only rules, a circuit-breaker ladder, and a reproducible backtest harness — one-time $29 (regular $49), yours to keep. You hold the keys, the capital, and the risk.
See pricing — $29Coil is software you install and run yourself, with your own brokerage credentials 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.