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 scored board an agent reads 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 scored board. With Coil Live ($29/mo or $249/yr) it is served over MCP to your own agent, which places orders over the same kind of plumbing — built for Claude as a scheduled agent, built for Robinhood (or any equivalent broker MCP). The Scanner ($12/mo or $99/yr) is the same board read in your browser. What you're buying is the part that's hard to get right: the market scan, the rules, and the reproducible evidence. Coil never holds accounts or keys.
- 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.
- A written-down method and a public record. The research backtest is point-in-time and survivorship-free, with delisted names included, so the numbers aren't flattered by hindsight, and the record is public.
- A served rulebook. The rules are versioned and served the same way to every subscriber. Why that matters is covered in self-tuning vs static trading bots.
- A subscription you can cancel. Scanner $12/mo or $99/yr; Live $29/mo or $249/yr.
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; a board like Coil's 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, a stop can still gap straight through a price. In both cases you own the keys, the capital, and the risk.
Bridge vs board — the comparison
| Question | Trayd (trayd-mcp) | Coil |
|---|---|---|
| What it fundamentally is | Execution bridge — agent hands on Robinhood | Scored board your agent reads over a bridge like it |
| Trading rules | You bring or author them — none in the box | Pre-built, long-only leader-rotation strategy behind every board |
| 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 published, point-in-time and survivorship-free |
| Risk controls | Whatever you implement | Long-only and cash-when-nothing-qualifies are in the rule-set; order-level limits sit with your broker and your agent |
| Integrity checks | Up to you | One served rulebook, the same for every subscriber; the record is public |
| Adapts to your fills | You code it if you want it — a bare bridge tunes nothing | No per-account tuning — one served rulebook, the same for every subscriber |
| Scope | Any ticker, any side, multi-account | Long-only, market-wide by design |
| Open source / hackable | Yes — free, fully readable, forkable | No — a published board, not a fork base |
| Price | Free | Subscription: Scanner $12/mo or $99/yr; Live $29/mo or $249/yr |
| 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; with Coil the strategy is the product.
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 and a published backtest handed to you — 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 Live serves the board to an agent that trades over the same agent-plus-broker pattern a bridge like Trayd demonstrates. Coil also ships its own free MCP server for market reads — claude mcp add --transport http coil https://mcp.coil.trade/mcp — so one Claude client can load Coil's scored board and an execution bridge side by side; the pairing recipe is on the For AI agents page.
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 Scanner is $12/mo or $99/yr and Live is $29/mo or $249/yr.
The strategy a bridge leaves out
Trayd gives an agent hands. Coil Live gives it a market-wide scored board and validated long-only rules, served over MCP. You hold the keys, the capital, and the risk.
Feed your agent — $29/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.