How Coil works

The short answer: Coil is an agent-native trading copilot: a scored board you read in your browser (Coil Scanner), or serve to your own AI agent (built for Claude / Claude Code) over MCP (Coil Live), 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 — 600+ 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. 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 bounded by the limits described 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. Where the limits sit

Everything above manages opportunity. Limits on the account itself sit on your side, because Coil serves data and places no orders:

• The served rulebook. Each stop is derived from the chart at entry, the cycle runs exits first, sizing is set by rule, and a feed that goes silent fails closed: the agent stops opening new positions and keeps managing its exits from its own records.
• Dry-run first. The rulebook's first rule tells the agent to print intended orders and place nothing until you explicitly arm it. Coil can’t enforce that on your machine and doesn’t pretend to; the arm switch is yours.
• Your account limits. Which account the agent may touch, position and exposure caps, and any loss halt are set by you, in your agent and at your broker. Coil doesn’t enforce them. Our guardrails template is a starting point.
• Robinhood’s rails. Live orders route over Robinhood’s official agentic-trading rails — dedicated agentic accounts connected via MCP — and Robinhood provides the rails but “does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, or audit these AI agents.”

Plainly: rules and limits reduce and bound damage; they do not remove market risk. Leveraged ETFs, where the strategy 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%.

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 my agent misbehaves?

Coil places no orders, so the limits that matter are yours. The served rulebook starts an agent in dry-run, and you arm it deliberately. The account it can touch and its caps are set in your agent and at your broker, and you can revoke its broker access at any time. A silent feed fails closed: no new entries.

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 board is Coil Scanner at $12/mo or $99/yr, and Coil Live serves it to your agent at $29/mo or $249/yr.