Frequently asked questions

blank is an autonomous AI trading advisor for Trading 212. It researches stocks, places trades and manages risk on your behalf, 24/7, with no buttons for you to press.

Built by Certified Random. Free during open beta in the UK and EU.

Functionally yes — it places trades autonomously. We use "advisor" because the engine is a large language model reasoning over evidence each cycle, not a hard-coded rule-based bot. Rule-based bots execute the same logic every time. blank looks at what the market is actually doing and decides.

Trading 212 only at launch. It's commission-free in the UK and EU, supports fractional shares, and has a clean REST API. IBKR, Alpaca and Schwab are on the roadmap.

No, and that's the point. blank is for people who don't want to micromanage. The advisor builds its own watchlist, picks what to research, decides what to trade, sizes positions and exits. You can chat with it about why it's doing what it's doing, but you don't pick names.

No. The advisor only runs while the desktop app is open (or your cloud instance is on). Close it and it pauses. Open it again and it picks up where it left off.

If you want true 24/7 without your laptop on, the cloud add-on handles that — £10/mo on Free, £5/mo on Pro, bundled on Unlimited.

You can still use blank in practice mode — same engine, real market data, virtual £100 sandbox. To go live you need a Trading 212 account, which is free to open in the UK and EU.

Free — £0/month, 50 live trading hours, unlimited chat, 30% commission on realised profit.

Pro — £25/month, unlimited live runtime, 48h practice, 20% commission, priority research.

Unlimited — £75/month, unlimited everything, 96h practice, 10% commission, cloud hosting bundled.

Cloud add-on: £10/mo on Free, £5/mo on Pro, bundled on Unlimited. Full breakdown on the pricing section.

On the last Friday of every calendar month, after market close, as a one-off card charge. Calculated on your net realised profit for the month, above your previous high-water mark. If you're in drawdown for the month, no commission is charged.

It's the highest cumulative profit you've ever paid commission on. You only pay commission on new high-water-mark profit — so if you give back gains, no commission until you climb above the previous peak. You never pay commission on the same profit twice.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no — like any trading approach. We don't make a return guarantee and we never will. We charge commission only on net realised profit above your high-water mark, so we lose money when you do. That alignment is the whole point.

If you're after guaranteed returns, blank is not for you. Nothing in trading guarantees returns.

No. Trading is risky and losses are possible — sometimes large ones. blank is designed to remove the work (researching, placing orders, managing exits), not the risk. Anyone telling you AI trading is easy money is selling you something.

Yes — from the dashboard, any time. Your existing positions stay in your Trading 212 account; only the AI advisor pauses. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle.

Safer than a lot of retail trading patterns (no leverage, no overnight gambling, no emotional bag-holding), but not risk-free. Specifically:

• Position sizing is Kelly-fraction capped — no all-in trades.
• Stops are ATR-based — wider in calm markets, tighter in panicky ones.
• Regime-aware sizing — exposure drops in detected high-vol periods.
• No margin, ever. Cash only.
• One-click kill switch in the desktop app.

That said, trading involves risk and losses are possible. Start small.

No. blank trades cash positions on the Trading 212 Invest or ISA account only. CFDs and leverage are not supported and aren't on the roadmap.

Three ways: (1) toggle live trading off in the desktop app — instant; (2) close the desktop app — supervisor stops mid-cycle; (3) revoke the API key in Trading 212 — nuclear option. None of these flatten your positions — they just stop new orders.

blank is software — not a regulated financial adviser. Certified Random is the publisher. Your broker (Trading 212) is the regulated party for executing your orders. blank does not provide personalised investment advice in the regulatory sense — it executes its own trading logic on your behalf inside the brokerage account you've authorised it to use.

The regime detector will see the volatility spike and the risk manager will reduce position sizing automatically. Stops are ATR-based so they widen with vol — they won't get knocked out by normal noise. That said, no system is crash-proof. The kill switch is one click.

Anthropic's Claude family. The supervisor (the decision-maker) is Opus at max effort. The research swarm is Sonnet (deep) and Haiku (quick). The post-iteration assessor is Sonnet. We standardised on Claude because its tool use is reliable and its long context window means we don't have to summarise away signal.

No. The licence server provisions an Anthropic key transparently when you sign in. The desktop app inherits it. You never see the key, never pay for tokens, never get an unexpected OpenAI bill.

Your journal, positions and config stay on your device in a local SQLite file. Your Trading 212 API key is held only in process memory and re-fetched from the encrypted-at-rest licence server on each sign-in. We don't sell or share data with anyone — full details in our privacy policy.

Windows 10+ desktop, macOS 12+ desktop, iOS companion app, web dashboard (any modern browser). Android is on the roadmap.

Yes — use the cloud add-on. We manage the instance, the restart, the log retention. If you want to self-host on your own VPS the desktop binary will run there if you have a graphical session — but you're on your own for upkeep.