Why we don't connect to your broker
WatchSignal does not connect to Robinhood, Webull, Public, eToro, Schwab, Fidelity, or any other brokerage. No SnapTrade. No Plaid. No OAuth handshake. We can't see your positions, your orders, your account balance, or your trade history — unless you type them in yourself.
That's a deliberate choice. Here's why.
Privacy
Your portfolio is the most sensitive financial data on your phone. It reveals what you own, what you've bet on, and how much money is at stake. Brokerage API tokens, once stored, are also a high-value target — a compromised aggregator can drain accounts at scale.
We don't want to be the breach. The simplest way to not leak portfolio data is to never collect it. Your holdings stay on your device; we never see them.
Conflict of interest
Most apps that connect to your broker make money one of three ways:
- Payment for order flow — they route your trades to a market maker who pays for the privilege
- Execution fees — they take a cut of every trade
- Rebates and revenue share — they earn when you transact, regardless of whether the trade was good for you
All three create the same incentive: get you to trade more. That's an awkward fit for an app whose job is to help you decide whether to trade.
WatchSignal earns one way: subscriptions. You pay us a flat monthly fee for the tool. We earn the same whether you trade ten times a day or hold for a year. Our incentive is for the tool to be good enough that you renew — not for you to churn through orders.
Regulatory honesty
We don't execute trades. We don't custody assets. We don't make personalized recommendations. WatchSignal is an analytical tool — it shows you the model's view, you make the decision.
Connecting to a broker would change that posture. The moment we have your positions and the ability to trigger orders, the regulatory and fiduciary surface area expands sharply: best-execution obligations, suitability analysis, KYC handling, conflicts disclosure, and a lot more.
We chose the smaller posture on purpose. It keeps the product honest about what it is.
What you give up
- No auto-import. You enter holdings manually (or paste a CSV).
- No real-time broker P&L. Portfolio math uses live market data and your entered cost basis — accurate but client-side, not pulled from your account.
- No one-tap trades from a signal. You'll take the signal to your broker yourself.
What you get instead
- On-device math. Portfolio performance, health scoring, rebalancing math, and tax-loss harvesting all run locally. Your numbers don't leave the phone.
- No tracking, no analytics SDKs. We don't profile your trading behaviour. We can't — we don't see it.
- A subscription, not a brokerage. One job, one revenue model, one set of incentives.
That's the trade we made. It costs you a few minutes of manual entry. It gives you a tool that has no reason to push you into a bad trade.
See our Privacy Policy and Sub-Processors page for the full list of services WatchSignal does — and does not — interact with.