The honest answer is that most do not, and that nobody who tells you otherwise in a headline can prove it. Trading is a negative-sum game after costs, so any tool has to beat both the market and its own fees. What separates a tool worth trying from a tool worth avoiding is not the size of the number it advertises. It is whether you can see the losses.
No tool can promise you a profit, and in the UK it is illegal for one to try. Under the FCA rules on financial promotions, a firm cannot advertise guaranteed returns or present past performance as an indicator of future results. If you see a bot advertising a fixed monthly percentage, you have learned something useful about the seller rather than the software.
What automation genuinely does well is remove the parts of trading that humans reliably get wrong: hesitating on an exit, sizing a position by feeling, skipping the stop loss because it feels close, and revenge-trading after a loss. That is a real edge. It is a behavioural edge, not a crystal ball.
Five questions kill most of them.
A backtest is a strategy that was fitted to data it has already seen. It costs nothing to produce a beautiful one. Live results, on a real account, with real fills and real slippage, are the only kind that mean anything.
A results page with no red on it is a selection, not a record. Any honest journal contains trades that went against it, because every real strategy has them.
Six weeks of a rising market proves nothing about a tool. You want to see it through a drawdown, because that is where the difference between discipline and luck shows up.
Subscription, spread, commission and slippage all come out of the same number. A tool that beats the market by two percent and charges three percent has lost you money while looking clever.
A flat monthly fee is paid whether you win or lose. A fee attached to realised profit is not. That does not make one honest and the other dishonest, but it does tell you where the incentive points.
blank does not publish a return figure, and will not. Two reasons, and the second matters more than the first.
The first is regulatory: blank is not FCA-authorised to give investment advice, so it does not advertise performance and does not present itself as a way to get rich. It is a tool that trades on your instruction, on your own broker account, with your risk settings.
The second is that a single number would be dishonest anyway. Results depend on when you started, how much you committed, what the market did, and which risk settings you chose. What blank gives you instead is the full journal: every trade it took, every trade it closed, the reasoning it wrote at the time, and the losses alongside the wins. You can read it in the app before you ever go live, because practice mode runs the same engine on real market data with virtual money.
Run it yourself, on virtual money, and judge the reasoning rather than the result. A week of watching an advisor explain what it is doing tells you far more than any performance page, because you find out whether its logic is something you would have agreed with. If it is not, no back-tested return will save you when it is your money.
Some do and most do not, and no honest tool will promise it. Trading is negative-sum after costs, so a tool has to beat the market and its own fees. The reliable benefit of automation is behavioural: it removes hesitation, emotional sizing and skipped stop losses. Treat any advertised return figure with suspicion, especially a backtested one.
Often they are backtests rather than live results. A backtest is fitted to data the strategy has already seen and costs nothing to make look good. Ask whether the record is live, on a real account, over a period that includes a drawdown, and whether the losing trades are shown.
Two reasons. blank is not FCA-authorised to give investment advice, so it does not advertise performance. And a single figure would be misleading anyway, because results depend on your start date, your capital and your risk settings. blank publishes the full trade journal instead, losses included.
Yes, and the first seven days cost nothing if you sign up before 1 September 2026. blank's practice mode runs the same engine on real market data with a virtual balance, so you can watch it decide and read its reasoning before anything goes live.
Practice mode runs the real engine on real market data with virtual money. Read what it decides and why.
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