Frequently asked questions

Below are the questions we get asked most, answered plainly. Coil is trading software you run yourself, so several answers come down to the same idea: you own the keys, the capital, and the risk. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. If you want the longer walkthrough first, the how-it-works page covers the mechanics end to end.

The basics

What is Coil?

Coil is rules-based, self-tuning trading software you download and run yourself on your own Mac, through your own brokerage account, with your own capital. An AI agent operates a fixed set of readable rules on a schedule you control. It is not a fund, not a managed account, not a signal service, and not investment advice. You own the keys, the capital, and the risk.

Is Coil investment advice?

No. Coil is software, not advice and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. It does not know your finances, goals, or tax situation, and it makes no suitability judgments. It executes pre-written rules against live prices. Everything it does happens in your own account, under your control, and the outcomes are yours. If you want to understand how the rules differ from a hand-tuned script, see self-tuning vs static trading bots.

What does Coil trade?

Two instruments and nothing else: SOXL and SOXS, the 3x long and 3x inverse semiconductor ETFs. Coil never touches single stocks, options, crypto, or any other ticker. Limiting itself to one ETF pair is deliberate — it keeps the strategy narrow enough to test honestly and audit fully. If you are new to the pair, SOXL vs SOXS explains how the long and inverse sides behave.

Cost and billing

How much does Coil cost, and what is the difference between Download and Pro?

Download is a one-time $9.99 purchase: you get the full self-tuning engine and it is yours to keep forever, offline, with no recurring charge. Pro is $25/month or $249/year and adds Coil Sync, which delivers each new cold-validated version of the engine as research improves it. Pro buys fresh, re-validated research — not permission to run software you already own.

Is Coil a subscription?

Only if you choose Pro. The $9.99 Download is a one-time purchase with no subscription — the engine keeps running offline whether or not you ever pay again. Pro ($25/month or $249/year) is the optional subscription, and it only governs delivery of new versions through Coil Sync. Cancel Pro and your downloaded engine keeps working exactly as it did. Full details are on the pricing page.

Can I cancel or get a refund?

Checkout, billing, taxes, and refunds are handled by Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record (powered by Stripe). You can cancel a Pro subscription at any time, and your one-time Download stays yours and keeps running. Refund requests go through Lemon Squeezy under its refund policy; reach out and we will help where we can.

Running it

What do I need to run Coil?

Four things: an AI agent (Coil is built for Claude running as a scheduled agent), a brokerage connector (built for Robinhood, works with any equivalent broker MCP), a Mac running macOS with Python 3.9 or newer, and a free Alpaca market-data key for price history. You schedule when the agent runs; Coil does the rest within its rules. The automate SOXL/SOXS with an AI agent guide walks through setup step by step.

Whose money and credentials are these?

Yours, entirely. Coil trades your own capital in your own brokerage account. Your broker credentials and API keys stay on your machine and never leave it — there is no Coil server holding your keys, your money, or your positions. Coil has no ability to move funds out of your account.

Can any AI agent run Coil, or only Claude?

Coil is built and tested for Claude running as a scheduled agent, and that is the supported, recommended setup. The engine itself is plain Python, so a capable agent that can run code on a schedule and call your broker connector could in principle operate it — but Claude is what we test against, and we make no guarantees for other agents. For more on what an agent can and cannot do here, see can Claude trade stocks?

Risk and results

Can Coil lose money?

Yes. As above, you can lose money — including everything you put in. No setting, circuit-breaker, or stop changes the fact that leveraged ETFs are designed for short holding periods and can move violently against a position. The honest framing on SOXL and leverage decay is required reading before you run anything live.

How does Coil manage risk?

With deterministic, rule-based protections. Entries are a "compression-to-ignition" leg-rider: a sustained 2%+ intraday move is treated as a short-timeframe reversal inside the prevailing 1h trend. Exits are a 0.8% counter-move soft trailing stop (about 2.4% on the 3x ETF) plus a 5% hard stop, and the inverse ETF is never held overnight. On top of that sits an equity high-water-mark circuit-breaker ladder — a 6% down day halts new entries, 10% and 15% drawdowns cut size, and 25% is a hard stop — alongside a 65% single-symbol cap. These reduce single-day damage; they cannot guarantee an outcome.

What are the backtested results, and how trustworthy are they?

Every figure here is backtested or forward-tested under modeled execution — not client or live returns, and past performance does not predict future results. The single strongest trailing 250-session window (to 2026-06-13) was +78.3% with profit factor 3.87 and 6.4% max drawdown — that is the best window in the test, so do not anchor on it. By regime:

• 2024 chop: +11.4% (PF 1.51).
• 2023 quiet bull: +3.1% (PF 1.19).
• 2022 bear: −1.4% — the honest weak spot, improved from −3.6% after a stand-down-to-cash gate on confirmed bear days.

Three of four backtested regimes are profitable and the bear is the loser we are still improving. The sample is small — about 115 trades a year on one ETF pair, under ~500 trades of total validation — so treat every figure as a hypothesis, not proof.

What does "self-tuning" actually mean?

Coil can re-fit its own parameters within hard, whitelisted bounds, validated by a cold-backtest harness that runs a fresh process per market regime so no cross-run cache warmth flatters the numbers. It is not an open-ended AI inventing new trades — it tunes a fixed strategy inside guardrails, ships with 20 integrity guards, and rolls back automatically if a change fails validation. Tellingly, the harness once caught its own three backtest bugs: a look-ahead, a next-day leak, and a sign-inverted short book. If you want the contrast with a frozen script, self-tuning vs static trading bots goes deeper.

Behavior and independence

What happens on days with no setup?

Coil holds cash. It does not force a trade to feel busy — if no qualifying compression-to-ignition setup appears, or a confirmed bear day triggers the stand-down gate, it simply stays out. Any uncommitted cash earns whatever your broker's variable sweep program pays (for example, Robinhood Gold quoted about 3.35% APY in early 2026 — that is the broker's variable yield, not paid by Coil and not risk-free). Staying in cash is just a position the rules can take.

Is Coil affiliated with Robinhood or NVIDIA?

No. Coil is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NVIDIA, the ICE Semiconductor Index, Robinhood, or Alpaca. It is built to work with Robinhood and Alpaca as a user-operated connector and data source; SOXL and SOXS track a semiconductor index that includes companies like NVIDIA, but Coil has no relationship with any of them.

Still deciding whether Coil fits your situation? It helps to compare it honestly against the alternatives in Coil vs trading bots and signal services, and to read the full leverage-decay primer before you commit any real capital.