Buying guide
Six questions,and our ownanswers to them
Every product in this category has a demo where it wins. These are the questions whose answers you cannot see from a demo, with ours stated so you can hold us to them.
The six
1. Where does its data come from, and how old is it?
A model recalling from training data will answer confidently about a price that is months out of date. Ask whether numbers are fetched at question time and whether their age is shown. Ours are fetched, and a stale one fails a risk check rather than sizing a trade.
2. What stands between a persuasive answer and an order?
If the answer is "the prompt", that is not a control. Ours: a separate service evaluates limits and signs an approval; the service holding the exchange credential refuses a signature that does not match what it is about to send. The model is not in that path.
3. What does it keep?
Alert history, run history, the decision behind each fill. Without a record you will judge the product by its most memorable hit — which is how a tool survives a year past the point where it stopped working.
4. What does one question cost?
A product that cannot tell you has not measured it, and "unlimited" is a tier that ends abruptly. Ours: about 3.7 cents for a full grounded analysis, a fraction of a cent for a lookup, with a daily ceiling checked before a turn runs.
5. Can you rehearse the whole thing for free?
Not a demo account with the interesting parts greyed out — the actual order path, the actual gate, the actual rounding. Ours is the whole product minus the exchange, on a paper account with a real balance.
6. What does it refuse to do?
A product with no list has not thought about it. Ours is a page, each item enforced by a service the assistant cannot reach, each with a test that fails when the guard is removed.
When this is the wrong product
Written down because a buying guide that never disqualifies itself is an advertisement.
- You want a grid or DCA bot running on eight exchanges tonight. A bot platform does that better and costs less.
- You trade equities or options. This is crypto; the equities connector is paused over a symbol-format problem.
- You want charting as the product. A technical-analysis platform will serve you better.
- You want a signal service that tells you what to buy. Nothing here will do that — the output is evidence and a proposal you confirm.
- You need ten years of history. There are about two, and that is a real ceiling on what can be tested.
Questions about choosing
Is an AI trading bot legal?
Trading your own account with your own tools is ordinary. What varies by jurisdiction is managing someone else’s money, and nothing here offers that.
Will it make me money?
No product in this category can honestly claim that, and the ones that do are the ones to discard first. What this one offers is a cheaper way to find out that an idea does not work.
How do I evaluate it in a week?
Screen for a setup you already trade, backtest it with costs on, paper trade it at your real size, and read what the risk gate refused. All four are free.