Getting started · Before you sign up
What you need before you start
Setting up YOLO takes about ten minutes. Most of that is on your broker’s website, not ours. This page lists everything you need to have ready, so you do not get halfway through and discover you are missing something.
Nothing here costs money, and nothing here risks money. Every YOLO account starts in demo and paper mode, on your broker’s own practice accounts.
1. An email address
This is your sign-in and where trade notifications go. Use one you check — when a position needs your approval, this is where YOLO asks.
2. A broker account — demo or paper
YOLO does not hold your money or execute trades itself. It places risk-managed orders on your account at a broker you control. You need an account at one of these:
- IG — a demo account. Used for IG-native options and daily-funded-bet style structures. Free to open, funded with practice money.
- Alpaca — a paper-trading account. Used for US equities and options. Free to open, funded with practice money.
One is enough to start. You can add the other later, and you can change brokers at any time from Settings.
3. That broker’s API credentials
These let YOLO place orders on your behalf. You generate them yourself, inside your broker’s own website, and you can revoke them there at any time without asking us.
- Alpaca — a Key ID and a Secret Key, generated from the Alpaca dashboard for your paper account.
- IG — your username, password and an API key generated from your IG demo account, plus the account you want traded.
Have these to hand, but do not enter them anywhere yet. YOLO asks for them after your account exists, on a step that tests the connection live before storing anything — we never keep a credential we have not verified.
4. Three decisions about how you want to trade
Setup asks you these. There are no wrong answers and you can change all of them later, but it is worth thinking about them before you are staring at the question:
- How much you can afford to lose on any one trade, as a percentage of your trading capital. This becomes a hard limit YOLO sizes every position against — it is the single most important number you will set.
- Your time horizon — whether you are looking at days, weeks or months.
- How much options experience you have. Answer this honestly rather than ambitiously: it decides which strategies YOLO will offer you at all.
5. Ten minutes and a clear head
The last step asks you to read and accept a short risk pledge. It is genuinely worth reading — trading loses money for most retail traders, and YOLO exists to reduce that, not to promise it away.
What you do NOT need
- Real money. Demo and paper accounts are funded with practice money. Going live is a separate, deliberate step you take later, if you ever choose to.
- A broker chosen up front. You can skip the broker question during sign-up and connect one from Settings whenever you are ready.
- Trading experience. YOLO is built for people who are still learning. Every trade it proposes states its maximum loss in money before you approve it.
Ready?
If you have the four things above, you have everything you need.
Want to understand the safety model first? Paper first: brokers, demo vs live & kill switches explains why YOLO defaults to practice money, what the kill switches do, and what going live would actually involve. See also Trust & Fees and Legal & Risk.