The rules
Bots4Stocks runs like a sports league for stock-picking bots. Here's who plays, how everyone is scored, and what each competition is. One rule runs through all of it: a bot wins by beating the S&P 500.
⚽ The idea
- Stocks are the athletes. Every company on our list has a rating built from its earnings reports, read and scored by AI. That's the Ticker Ranking.
- Bots are the teams. A bot's rules are its tactics (what it buys, how much, when it sells) and its holdings are its roster.
- Earnings reports are the matches. Every new report changes a stock's rating, and the bots react by their own rules at that day's closing price.
So when a bot leads, there's always a reason: the stocks it picked, and the rules that picked them.
👥 Who plays
- House bots (7): our own bots, each with fixed rules. Ace, Rex, Max, Old Man and Ladder are ours; Compass and Catalyst were designed by Claude and Gemini.
- AI bots (9): each one designed by a different AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and more) from the same brief, with its rules locked exactly as the AI submitted them.
- Player bots: anyone can build a bot and enter it, up to 3 per person.
Everyone gets the same thing: $50,000 of paper money, the same AI-scored earnings reports and the same closing prices. Every bot runs on Autopilot: it trades by its rules every market day, with nobody pressing buttons.
📏 Scoring: one rule everywhere
Every table on the site ranks bots the same way: % ahead of the S&P 500 over the bot's own days. A bot that made +5% while the S&P 500 made +3% over the same days scores +2%. A bot that made +1% while the market made +3% scores −2%: it made money, but you'd have done better in an index fund.
The S&P 500 is the usual yardstick for the whole stock market, and most professional funds fail to beat it over the years. That's the bar.
Bots that started on different days are each compared with the S&P 500 over their own days, so a late starter is never punished for a market drop it missed, or helped by one.
⭐ The League: the all-time table
- Never ends. It's the long game: can a bot beat the market for months and years, with every trade public?
- Seasoning: a new bot gets its rank after 20 market days (about a month), so a lucky first week can't top the table.
- Everyone plays: house bots, AI bots and player bots, in one table.
- Rules locked: once a bot enters, its rules never change. Want different rules? Enter a new bot.
🏆 The Cups: tournaments with medals
Cups have fixed dates and medals (🥇 🥈 🥉); the Top 10 get a trophy on their bot page.
- The Beta Cup 2026: Oct 19, 2026 to Dec 31, 2026, open to every bot. A bot needs 20 market days in the cup by the end to get an official rank, so the last day to enter is Dec 2, 2026. Until a bot has 20 days, its position shows in gray. Scored by % ahead of the S&P 500 over the bot's own days in the cup.
- Season Cups, one per quarter (the first: Q1 2027, starting January 4), and the Year Cup (2027). Every bot that's already running when a cup starts is in it automatically, and everyone is measured over the very same days, from the cup's first day to its last.
- Ranks become official and medals are handed out when a cup ends. Players who ticked Cup alerts on the entry form get an email when their bot wins a medal or finishes in the Top 10.
🤖 The AI Race: a rivalry
- 9 AIs, one brief. Each AI designed one bot from the same brief, with the same data and the same $50,000. All of them started on the same day.
- Same rules as everyone. The AI bots play in the League and the cups like any other bot. The AI Race is their own table inside it, plus a country match-up (the best bot of each AI's home country).
- The challenge: can a player's bot beat ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini? Try it.
📈 The Ticker Ranking: the athletes' ratings
- Joining the list: a stock joins when one of its earnings reports passes the price screen: at least 25% over 1 year and 125% over 5 years, plus size and trading-volume minimums. If a newer report fails the screen, it leaves the list (and stays findable on the rankings page).
- The rating: AI reads each earnings report and scores it 0 to 100. A stock's rating mixes its latest score, the trend of its scores, its valuation grade (A to F) and its 1-year gain.
- Getting ranked: a stock needs enough scored reports to have a record. Until then it waits under "Not ranked yet".
- Why ranks move: a new report changes the score and the trend, the price moves the 1-year gain, or other stocks move past it.
🤝 Fair play
- Up to 3 League bots per person, entered through the form with your bot's share link.
- No copies: a bot must differ from every house bot, and from your own other bots, in at least one setting.
- Retiring: you can retire one of your bots from My bots. It stops trading, and its spot opens again after 20 market days, so nobody can keep restarting bots until one gets lucky.
- Names: keep bot names and nicknames friendly; offensive ones are turned down.
- Looks: a bot's icon, color and flag are cosmetic and never change how it trades.
- Everything is public: every League bot's rules, holdings and trades are visible to everyone. Emails never are.
Paper trading only: no real money, no real trades, no commissions, taxes or slippage. Simulated results don't predict future results, and nothing here is financial advice. Disclaimer