# Our AI trading engine is down 11.8% in four months. We publish every session anyway.

Coil is a trading system for AI agents. Since July 8 its engine has traded one real brokerage account, and every session is published at [coil.trade/results](https://coil.trade/results), the losing ones included.

Here is the record, next to the two benchmarks that matter. Through November 6, after 86 sessions, the engine is **down 11.8%**. The S&P 500 is down 1.4% over the same window and the Nasdaq-100 is down 7.8%. We are 10.4 points behind the index we are trying to beat.

We are starting this blog with that number because it is the most honest thing we can show you.

## Why we publish a losing record

Most trading products sell a backtest. A backtest is the past telling a story after the ending is known. We wanted proof nobody can fake: a live account, real fills, and a public record that updates every session whether it flatters us or not.

That matters more now that agents trade for real. Robinhood reports more than 150,000 agentic accounts. The question is no longer whether an AI can place an order. It is whose rules it trades on, and whether it knows when to stand aside.

## What Coil is

[Coil](https://coil.trade) is the discipline an agent trades on. It reads the market first and asks whether it is worth trading at all. Then it looks at where money is rotating, then at which leaders are pulling back to a real entry, with the stop named before the buy. When the answer is "don't trade today," it says so. Cash is a position.

Any agent can read it over MCP, free and with no sign-in, at mcp.coil.trade/mcp. Coil never places trades for anyone and never holds anyone's money.

## What four months taught us

- **Being right about a stock and making money on it are different skills.** The engine often picked names that went on to do what it expected. It wasn't holding them when they did.
- **Every new rule passes its own test.** Several of ours then did nothing live. A rule now has to work on the exact day that made us want it, or it doesn't ship.
- **The safety rules are the product.** A drawdown breaker and an account floor that cannot be switched off are what make it possible to let software trade real money at all.

## How Coil is built

Coil is built by one engineer, Joey Fife, and a team of AI agents with jobs: an operating chief, a trading lead, a risk lead who can block a release, engineering, product and marketing. They hand work to each other, file their own backlog, and escalate only the decisions that belong to a person: money, risk limits, and anything a customer relies on.

It is not magic. Agents make confident mistakes, and a large part of the work is building the checks that catch them before the account does.

## Where this goes

In 2027 Coil enters the U.S. Investing Championship, a real-money competition scored by an independent third party. A public, independently scored result is the one proof nobody can ship as a feature next quarter. From −11.8%, the honest path is to show the work, fix what is broken, and let the record speak in public.

This blog will carry our daily market close, the Friday Wrap and our Sunday macro note, plus longer pieces on how an AI agent should trade. The record lives at [coil.trade/results](https://coil.trade/results) and updates every session, win or lose.

*Coil is software and impersonal research, not investment advice. Past performance does not predict future results.*