How YOLO makes money — and why you can check our numbers

Every number is computed by us — none are self-reported

Expert track records on YOLO are verified by construction. When an expert publishes a signal, our platform timestamps it and records the market price at that moment; when it closes, we record the closing price. Win rates, drawdowns and the YOLO Risk Score are computed server-side from those records.

Experts cannot upload, edit or embellish their own performance. There are no screenshots, no imported track records, no self-certified returns. If a number is on an expert's profile, our systems computed it from signals we observed end to end.

Your own results follow the same rule: realised P&L is frozen at the moment a position closes and never restated.

How we make money (and how we don't)

We take no payment for order flow. Regulators have shown PFOF is associated with worse options execution for retail traders — we have none of it, from any venue.

We are non-custodial: your money sits at your own broker — Alpaca and IG are supported today, and more can be added — under that broker's own client-money protections. YOLO never holds client funds.

Expert subscriptions carry a platform commission (currently 15%) — that is the business model. We make nothing from your trade count, your order routing, or your losses. Nothing in this product is designed to make you trade more.

You approve every trade

Nothing executes without your explicit two-step confirmation — select, review the plain-English max loss, then confirm. Auto-trading is opt-in, revocable, scoped per expert and broker, and sits behind kill switches at every level.

Every generated order carries its risk disclosure, max loss, strategy legs and a full audit trail you can inspect on the position card.

No casino mechanics — by policy

Research shows confetti, streaks and most-traded leaderboards causally increase risk-taking, hitting the least experienced hardest. YOLO ships none of them, and our expert rankings use risk-adjusted, drawdown-aware metrics — never raw hot streaks or trade counts.

Practice money is the default. Our demo accounts run on real broker demo environments (IG demo, Alpaca paper) with real fills — not a flattering simulation.

What we don't promise

We make no promise of profit. A capped-risk options structure bounds what a single trade can lose; a stop-based trade bounds the plan, not a gap. Neither makes trades win. Track records show losses as plainly as gains, and always will.

See a complete trade receipt

Claims are easy; receipts are better. We publish a complete worked walkthrough of one trade — a real, closed expert signal, the defined-risk candidate YOLO built from it, the fills, every cost including the £0.00 platform fee on trades, and the net GBP outcome of a trade that lost: Anatomy of a YOLO trade — the full receipt.

Our AI expert is held to the same standard

One of the experts on YOLO is ours: an AI. It would be easy to quietly grade our own homework, so we don’t. Every AI trade idea carries a stated confidence, and we publish the check on that confidence in public — what it said would happen next to what actually happened, band by band, with the sample size and the window: How accurate is our AI expert?

Losses appear at the same size and in the same colour as wins, a band with too few finished trades is marked as withheld rather than given a flattering number, and the page states plainly whether the AI is still in shadow (recorded but not published to anyone). It is a calibration record, not a profit claim.

When things break, we say so

Our platform status page shows the live health of every service behind YOLO, measured by our own systems — plus a public post-incident history that lives in version control, so it cannot be quietly rewritten.