How Coil works

The short answer: Coil is an agent-native trading copilot you run on your own machine — Mac or Windows — inside your own AI agent (built for Claude / Claude Code), with your own broker and your own capital.

It does three things in one: a scanner scores every name in the Equities book (S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, and a Macro book of bonds, income, gold and metals, commodities — ~560 names); a dashboard shows you the whole board — the picks, the posture, the sector rotation, the "why" behind each score; and a long-only engine trades those published scores by rule. It buys leaders at real entries, never chases what has already run, never catches a falling knife, and sits in cash when nothing qualifies. It ships disarmed, and nothing here is a signal service, managed money, or investment advice. Below is exactly how each piece works, and where it's weak.

The thesis: buy the leaders, at the moment they're ready

Markets are led by a rotating handful of names. In one regime it's semis; in another it's financials, energy, or health care; sometimes leadership leaves equities entirely and the safe money is in bonds or gold. The durable edge isn't picking a sector and marrying it — it's owning whatever is actually leading, and only entering when the entry is real. That's the whole idea in the name: Coil looks for a leader coiled at support — compressed, holding, ready — and strikes when it releases, rather than piling in after the move is obvious. It just does that across the entire market now, not one corner of it.

The non-obvious part is the discipline, not the ambition. Anyone can hold a list of strong stocks. The hard, unglamorous work is refusing the two entries that quietly lose money: buying a name that is still falling (it looks cheap; it keeps getting cheaper) and chasing a name that has already gone vertical (it looks strong; you're the last buyer). Coil is built to say no to both.

1. It scans and scores every name

Every cycle, the scanner walks the full Equities book — the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, and the Macro book — and scores each name on a set of independent, readable factors. No black box; the dashboard shows you the number and the research note behind it. The factors that matter most:

Those factors combine into a single opportunity score per name — the 0–100 number the dashboard prints, weighted 0.4 Leadership + 0.3 Entry + 0.3 Hold, so a chase, a falling knife, or a name you can't hold with confidence gets marked down no matter how strong its chart looks. One naming note, so every page on this site reads as one system: the entry window is the same thing the board calls the entry state, and hold-conviction is the same thing the board calls hold strength — three lenses, one score. The scanner also maps a name to a leveraged vehicle where one exists — NVDA to NVDL, the Nasdaq-100 to TQQQ, semis to their 3x ETF — so the engine can accelerate a high-conviction leader at a fraction of the notional. The dashboard is the source of truth: it publishes the scores, the Top-6 picks, the posture header, the sector-rotation view, and the structural stop and target for each name. The engine never re-guesses the board; it trades what the scanner publishes.

2. The entry discipline: READY vs CHASE vs FALLING

This is the part most tools skip, so it gets its own heading. A "strong stock" is not a signal — where it is in its move is the signal. Coil's entry window is a hard gate, and it exists to keep you from the two losing entries:

• READY / SETUP — buy. A leader that has pulled back into support, compressed, and is holding or turning up at a real, structural entry. This is the coil. Volume-profile and Fibonacci support/resistance define the level; the engine wants to be here before the move, not after.
• WAIT — not yet. A good name, but not at an entry. The engine watches and waits for it to come to the level rather than paying up for it today.
• CHASE — refuse. A name pinned at its highs, extended after a thrust. It may keep going; it may also hand back the whole move to the first buyer at support. Coil will not chase it — an intraday-thrust guard specifically downgrades names sitting on today's highs so a rec is truly ready, not chasing the open.
• FALLING — refuse. A name still in decline. "Cheap" is not an entry; a falling knife keeps falling. The engine buys weakness inside a confirmed uptrend, not weakness that is still breaking down.

The edge Coil is built on is buying disciplined weakness in an uptrend, not chasing breakouts and not bottom-fishing. Standing down is a position — on most cycles, most of the board is WAIT, CHASE, or FALLING, and that's intentional.

3. The engine: rank, size, accelerate, exit

The engine reads the published board and acts by rule. It is long-only by design — there is no short book to invert, no leverage you didn't opt into.

• Rank by buy score. Among names that are actually at an entry, the engine ranks by a composite buy score (opportunity, leadership, entry quality, posture) and works down the list — the best available signal wins, wherever it sits in the Equities book — the S&P, the Nasdaq-100, or the Macro book. One unified pool, no per-book quota.
• Size by conviction. Cleaner, stronger setups earn more size; marginal ones earn less. Every size the strategy asks for is then clamped by the safety spine (below).
• Accelerate with leverage, at reduced notional. For the highest-conviction leaders, the engine can express the position through the mapped leveraged ETF — but sized down, so the leveraged exposure is a fraction of a full position, not a full position tripled. Leverage is an accelerator on the best names, never the default vehicle. (Why that matters, and why leverage decays, is its own topic — see leveraged-ETF decay.)
• Exit on a ladder, trail the rest. Positions scale out at structural targets and carry a trailing stop that follows price in your favor. The stop is the backstop, not the plan; the primary exits are rule-based, taken when the reason for the position stops working.
• Cash is a position. When the pool is thin — few leaders at real entries, defensive posture — the engine raises cash rather than force a trade. Idle cash sits in the broker's own cash sweep (variable, set by the broker, e.g. Robinhood Gold quoted ~3.35% APY in early 2026 — the broker's yield, not Coil's, and not risk-free). In a genuine down market, "down" means more cash and a defensive rotation into the Macro book — bonds, income, gold — never a short.

The honest caveat on exits: a stop is not a guarantee. Markets gap, and a position can open beyond its stop — a stop cannot fill inside a gap. That risk is real and permanent, and it is exactly why the engine sizes leveraged vehicles down.

4. The safety spine — the failsafe, not the steering

Everything above manages opportunity. A separate, deliberately dumb layer sits underneath it and bounds damage. The strategy proposes; the safety spine disposes. It is the seatbelt, not the steering wheel:

• Account whitelist. Coil can only touch the one account you explicitly allowlist. Every other account you hold is off-limits by construction.
• Hard caps. A ceiling on any single name's share of equity, and on total exposure — so the book is never fully concentrated in one position, even at maximum conviction.
• Drawdown ladder. A layer that watches your loss on the day and your cumulative drawdown from your equity high-water mark, and escalates as it deepens — halt new entries, then cut size, then cut further, then a full stand-down. Read it as an account-level limit across a bad streak, not a per-trade loss; a single trade is cut at its own exit long before any of this.
• Kill switch, and it fails closed. One command halts everything. And if anything is ambiguous — a data gap, a failed check, an integrity mismatch — the engine does not trade. It fails closed, toward doing nothing, never toward guessing.
• Ships disarmed. Out of the box LIVE_TRADING is off. You dry-run first, and going live is a separate, deliberately gated flow: allowlist your account, re-pin the integrity fingerprint, pass the safety self-test, and type a total-loss acknowledgment. Live orders route over Robinhood's official agentic-trading rails — dedicated agentic accounts connected via MCP — with this safety spine layered on top, because Robinhood provides the rails but "does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, or audit these AI agents."

Plainly: the spine reduces and bounds damage; it does not remove market risk. Leveraged ETFs, where the engine uses them, can lose value rapidly, including total loss of the amount committed to them.

5. The research backbone — and the honesty rider

Numbers are only as honest as the machine that produces them, and the frame around them. Coil's scoring is built on a research backtest, not a live track record: the leadership-rotation backbone replayed on point-in-time index membership (delisted names included, so there's no survivorship bias), with next-open fills and trading costs modeled, from 2017 through the first half of 2026. Here is the whole record, with SPY next to every number:

Cumulatively the backbone compounded +638% versus SPY's +282%, with a shallower worst drawdown (−23% vs −32%) and a positive result in 9 of 10 years — the only red year was 2018, at −1%, when SPY fell −7%.

Self-tuning, on a leash

Coil adapts, but only where adapting is safe. The validated rule-set is frozen and fingerprinted — Coil is not an open-ended AI inventing new trades on your machine. What adapts is deliberately narrow: position sizing, and only sizing. Every close, a local learning pass (python3 -m coil_v4.learn) reads your own closed round trips and leans size toward what has been working for you — nothing else moves.

• What it tilts. Sizing by book (S&P 500 / Nasdaq-100 / Macro) and by buy-score tier. It never touches which names it buys, the entry windows, the exits, the stops, or the caps.
• The clamps. Each tilt is clamped, and the stacked product is clamped again to roughly 0.55×–1.35× overall. Tilts are shrinkage-weighted, so one trade barely moves the dial — it takes a history to move much — and the loop is a neutral no-op until you have about two or more closed round trips behind it.
• Live only. It learns from live round trips only; the ledger is mode-isolated, so nothing tunes until you arm the engine and close real trades. Dry-runs and backtests never feed it.
• The audit trail. Every tilt is written to a readable log (optimization_log.json) — exactly what changed, by how much, and why. It also surfaces diagnostics it never auto-acts on: which sectors, sleeves, and entry-quality bands have been paying or bleeding.

It runs entirely on your machine — nothing leaves it, and your history persists across packet updates. New validated structure arrives only as a deliberate new version you choose to download; updates are announced on coil.trade and installed manually, never pushed to your machine. The packet ships with the research backtest harness and a safety self-test suite, so you can re-run the research and verify the spine yourself rather than take either on faith.

Common questions

What does Coil actually scan?

Every name in the Equities book — the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100 and a Macro book of bond, income, metal and commodity ETFs — about every 5 minutes through the US market day. Each name gets three scores: opportunity (0–100), entry state, and hold strength. Nothing is pre-filtered; the whole universe is on the board, bad scores included.

What is the difference between READY, CHASE and FALLING?

READY means the name is a leader sitting at a real structural level inside an uptrend — the only state the engine buys. CHASE means it is extended above that level; buying there is paying up for a move that already happened, so the engine refuses. FALLING means price is below structure with no confirmed floor — a knife, not a dip.

What happens if the engine misbehaves?

Live trading ships OFF and stays off until you arm it. Once armed, a per-order cap, a total-exposure cap and a drawdown breaker sit underneath the rules and cannot be talked past by a prompt. Ambiguity halts rather than guesses, and one command stops everything.

Does Coil optimize itself?

Only on size. The learning loop grades every closed trade and adjusts how much the next one risks; it never retunes the scoring composite, because a live retune was tested and its out-of-sample sign flipped. What the engine buys is fixed and readable before you run it — what it bets is what learns.

Where to go next

If you want the operator side — how a scheduled Claude agent and a broker connector actually arm and run this on your machine — read the agentic trading guide. If you're weighing Coil against bots and signal services, the comparison lays out the differences. The whole system is a $79 one-time download, yours to keep and run forever.