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

Do I need my own AI agent?

For the Trading Bot, yes, and there is no way around it. Coil is the brain and the rule engine; your agent is the hands. It is built and tested for Claude Code running as a scheduled agent against a brokerage connector (built for Robinhood's agentic accounts over MCP). If you don't have an agent and don't want one, the Trading Bot is not for you — Coil Scanner is the same scores in a browser tab, and you place any trades yourself.

Does Coil place trades by itself?

No. Coil contains no order-placement code and never holds your broker credentials. The engine decides and writes the order; your own AI agent reads it and places it at your brokerage. Two consequences: Coil cannot trade without an agent you connect, and it ships disarmed — going live is a separate gated step (allowlist your account, re-pin the integrity fingerprint, pass the self-test, type a total-loss acknowledgment).

What is Coil?

Coil is an agent-native trading system you download and run yourself on your own Mac or Windows machine, inside your own AI agent, through your own brokerage account, with your own capital. It is three things in one download: a scanner that scores every name in the Equities book (S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, and Macro — ~560 names); a dashboard that shows you the whole board; and a long-only engine that trades those scores by rule. 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.

What does Coil trade?

Market-wide leaders. Coil scores every name across the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, and a Macro book (bonds, income, gold and metals, commodities), and buys whatever is actually leading — at a real entry. It is long-only. For the highest-conviction leaders it can accelerate the position through a mapped leveraged ETF (for example NVDA via NVDL, or the Nasdaq-100 via TQQQ) at reduced size, so leverage is an accelerator on the best names rather than the default vehicle. When semis lead, Coil holds semis; when leadership rotates, so does Coil. The board Coil publishes also carries the Crypto book (BTC/ETH) as a read — the engine itself does not trade crypto.

Does Coil trade crypto?

The engine, no — the $29 download is a long-only equities engine and does not trade crypto. The board, yes as a read: since July 15, 2026 the Coil Scanner board carries the Crypto book, scoring BTC and ETH with long-only trend signals — two 50% sleeves, each in-asset only while its price holds above its 50-day average and BTC holds above its 200-day, in cash otherwise, evaluated on the UTC daily close. Signals are tracked live since July 15, 2026 — backtest before that — and the Crypto book is not traded with real money by Coil. The full numbers, losses included.

Do the crypto signals beat buy-and-hold?

No — and we lead with that. Over 2016–2026 the cold backtest compounded 59.6% CAGR versus 74.9% for a 50/50 BTC/ETH hold. What the rule buys is smaller crashes: 2022 finished 0.0% versus −66.0% for holding, with a max drawdown of −64.3% versus −87.4% — at the cost of whipsaw years (2024: −22.6% versus +74.7%). It is a risk posture, not a moonshot; these are research backtests under modeled conditions and do not predict future results. The record, ugly parts first.

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.

Can Coil short the market?

No — Coil is long-only by design. There is no short book. When the market turns down, "down" means raising cash and rotating defensively into the Macro book (bonds, income, gold), not shorting. This is a deliberate choice: shorting inverts risk and adds a failure mode we would rather not carry, and cash is a perfectly good position.

What happens when nothing qualifies?

Cash is a position. Coil does not force a trade to look busy — if few leaders are at a real entry, or the market posture is defensive, it raises cash and waits. 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). Standing down is just one of the moves the rules can make.

Cost and billing

How much does Coil cost?

Two products. The Coil engine is a single one-time download, $29 at launch (regular $49) — the whole system (scanner, dashboard, engine, onboarding), yours to keep and run forever, no recurring charge. Coil Scanner is a separate hosted subscription — $12/month or $99/year — that publishes the scanner’s daily scored board in your browser at coil.trade/scanner, with a free preview of today's publish and a click-around demo.

Is Coil a subscription? How do updates work?

The engine is not a subscription — it is a one-time $29 purchase you keep forever, offline, with no recurring charge. New versions are announced on coil.trade and installed manually when you choose to; nothing is auto-pushed. The optional Coil Scanner is a subscription (it is a hosted daily publication — hosting and publishing are ongoing work); cancel anytime from your Gumroad library and access runs to the end of the paid period.

What is Coil Scanner, and how is it different from the engine?

Coil Scanner is the scanner’s daily output, hosted: every name in the Equities book (S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, and Macro) — plus the Crypto book (BTC/ETH) — scored each market morning, with regime verdicts and buy-list lanes, readable in your browser — $12/month, cancel anytime. The engine is the whole system you download once ($29) and run inside your own AI agent against your own brokerage; it includes this same scanner locally. Board = the read, for humans. Engine = the system, for your agent. If you buy the engine you don’t need the Board. The Board is an impersonal research publication — same board for every subscriber, no stop/target prices, not individualized advice.

Can I get a refund?

All sales are final. Coil is an instant digital download you keep the moment you buy it, so once it is delivered there are no change-of-mind refunds. The one thing we always fix is a genuine billing error — a duplicate charge, or being charged the wrong amount — which is a billing correction, not a refund. Checkout, receipts, and license keys are handled by Gumroad as merchant of record; email support@coil.trade for a billing correction and we will sort it out. Full details are in the refund policy.

Running it

Do I need Claude to run Coil?

Coil is built and tested for Claude running as a scheduled agent (Claude Code), 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?

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 or Windows machine with Python 3.9 or newer, and a free Alpaca market-data key for price history. Robinhood officially supports agentic trading with dedicated agentic accounts connected over MCP — see Robinhood's agentic-trading page. Setup is agent-led: point your agent at the folder and it runs the interactive setup, introduces itself, scans the market, and opens the dashboard with live scores within minutes — then watches in dry-run. Going live is a separate, deliberately gated flow. The Claude + Robinhood agentic trading guide walks through it.

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, and it can only touch the single account you explicitly allowlist.

Risk and results

Can Coil lose money?

Yes. You can lose money — including, on any leveraged position the engine takes, the total loss of the amount committed to it. No setting, circuit-breaker, or stop changes the fact that markets can move violently against a position, and leveraged ETFs are designed for short holding periods. The honest framing on leveraged-ETF decay is worth reading before you run anything live.

How does Coil manage risk?

Two ways. First, entry discipline: it only buys leaders at real entries (scored READY or SETUP), never chasing extended names pinned at their highs and never buying falling knives, and it sizes leveraged vehicles down. Second, a hard safety spine underneath the strategy: an account whitelist, hard position and exposure caps, a drawdown ladder keyed to your equity high-water mark, a kill switch, and fail-closed behaviour — if anything is ambiguous, it does nothing. These reduce and bound damage; they cannot guarantee an outcome, and stops can still gap straight through a price.

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

Coil's scoring is built on a research backtest, not a live track record. On point-in-time index membership (delisted names included, so no survivorship bias), with next-open fills and costs modeled, the leadership-rotation backbone compounded +638% from 2017 through the first half of 2026 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). The honest rider matters, so we lead with it:

What does "self-tuning" actually mean?

The validated rule-set is frozen and fingerprinted — Coil is not an open-ended AI inventing new trades on your machine. What adapts is narrow: every close, a local learning pass leans position sizing (only sizing) toward what has been working across your own closed trades, split by book (S&P 500 / Nasdaq-100 / Macro) and by buy-score tier. The tilts are shrinkage-weighted and hard-clamped (roughly 0.55×–1.35× overall), so one trade barely moves the dial. It never touches entries, exits, stops, or caps and cannot invent new structure, and every tilt is written to a readable audit trail. New validated structure arrives only as a deliberate new version you choose to download. The packet ships the research backtest harness and a safety self-test suite so you can re-run the research and verify the spine yourself. If you want the contrast with a frozen script, self-tuning vs static trading bots goes deeper.

Does Coil learn from my trading?

Yes — gently, and only your sizing. Every close, a local pass reads your own closed round trips and leans position sizing toward what has been working, split by book (S&P 500 / Nasdaq-100 / Macro) and by buy-score tier. It is size-only: it never touches which names it buys, the entries, the exits, the stops, or the caps. The tilts are shrinkage-weighted and hard-clamped (roughly 0.55×–1.35× overall), so one trade barely moves the dial and it stays neutral until you have a couple of closed round trips behind it. It learns from live round trips only — nothing tunes until you arm the engine and close real trades — it runs entirely on your machine with nothing leaving it, and every tilt is written to a readable audit trail (optimization_log.json). It also surfaces diagnostics it never auto-acts on: which sectors, sleeves, and entry-quality bands have been paying or bleeding.

Independence

Is Coil affiliated with Robinhood or any index or fund?

No. Coil is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Robinhood, Alpaca, or any exchange, index, or fund it references. It is built to work with Robinhood and Alpaca as a user-operated connector and data source; any tickers it trades are named descriptively, and Coil has no relationship with their issuers.

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 leverage-decay primer before you commit any real capital to a leveraged position.