AI Trading Agents Gain Traction
Robinhood says nearly 100,000 customers opened Agentic Trading accounts in about two months; three other brokers have also opened their platforms to agents in recent months.
Hey, I’m Matt. I’m a former Bloomberg News reporter, and you’re reading AI Street, where I report on how Wall Street uses AI.
I’m traveling to Rhode Island to visit friends and family for a couple weeks (if you’re in the area, reach out!). I plan to keep AI Street publishing as usual while stateside.
Bots now generate more web traffic than humans. Cloudflare had expected to reach this milestone next year, but it happened in June.
While humans have limited time and attention, agents can theoretically run 24/7 and juggle multiple webpages at once.
Take this dynamic into markets and you’re likely going to see a lot more trading. We discussed this trend earlier this year: when Italy banned ChatGPT for a month in 2023, investors narrowed their trading to well-known companies, and once ChatGPT came back, trading broadened out again.
And in June, I wrote:
I’m having a hard time seeing trading not marching higher and permeating into more markets given current AI trading trends. It didn’t make a lot of economic sense to spend limited human time researching smaller markets. Now it does.
Continuing this trend, here’s Bloomberg with a story on how retail traders are leveraging AI for more sophisticated trading strategies.
The article highlights a couple points we’ve covered here along with nice anecdotes.
AI is (obviously) not a magic money-making machine.
Crowding is a real risk.
The article quotes HFT Irene Aldridge, who I interviewed here, saying “AI models are parsing the same data, using very similar models and outputting very similar results to everyone,” she said. “We’re going to see a lot more volatility as a result of this.”
AI could amplify losses.
The article quotes AI and finance researcher Alicia Vidler, who I also interviewed, on the risks: “Lots of trading systems are not designed for volatile environments,” she said. “You have much more risk in a down market.”
False AI confidence needs to be mitigated.
“It will answer incredibly confidently on anything you ask regardless if it knows it or not,” Joel Rieger, a former software-sales executive, told Bloomberg.
This is a topic I’ve covered here: AI Replicates Human Investor Biases.
All that said, the rollout is moving quickly. AI-agent trading may be a novelty today, but I suspect it will become a standard offering.
AI Agent Trading
Since March, four retail brokers have launched or begun rolling out AI-linked trading tools, ranging from autonomous execution to AI-assisted order drafting.
Public.com launched native agents that can execute user-approved workflows across stocks, options and crypto.
Moomoo released API Skills, connecting outside agents to its market-data and trading infrastructure.
Robinhood introduced dedicated accounts where third-party agents may execute trades without direct approval of each transaction.
Interactive Brokers let customers connect Claude and other MCP-compatible AI tools, although clients must review and submit every order.
In about two months, more than 100,000 people had connected an agent and opened a dedicated Agentic account at Robinhood, CEO Vlad Tenev said on an earnings call last week. Robinhood said assets and trading volumes were also growing, though it did not disclose either figure.
In April, Moomoo, the trading platform owned by Futu Holdings, launched tools that let customers connect AI agents to analyze markets and prepare trades. Since then, the number of traders using its US API has more than doubled. (The figure includes all API users, not only those trading with AI agents, so it is a proxy for adoption.)
“It used to require meaningful coding chops to access trading APIs and do real volumes,” David Rodríguez, product lead at Moomoo US, told me. “The learning curve has shifted significantly, and we’re seeing the results unfold in real time.”
ROUNDUP
What Else I’m Reading
Millennium Partners With Anthropic to Develop AI Risk Analyst | BBG
JPM CEO Dimon leads new cross-industry effort to tackle AI risks | Reuters
AI Skills More Valuable Than MBAs, 86% of Finance Executives Say | BBG
The Investing Heavyweights That Backed Situational Awareness Before It Blew Up | WSJ
Google shakes up AI leadership as DeepMind chief shifts role | Reuters
Four Top Google A.I. Researchers Form New Start-Up | NYT
Rabobank to invest €2 billion in building IT framework for AI | Finextra
Cloudflare gives AI agents an identity and a wallet | Finextra
Wall Street hit by wave of AI-powered ’vishing’ cyberattacks | Yahoo
Goldman Sachs asset arm forms AI investing platform, memo shows | Reuters
Xi Chen joins JPM as MD, Head of AI for Electronic Markets | LinkedIn
This Week in AI Street
How Bridgewater Is Building an Artificial Investor
For more than a decade, Bridgewater’s co-CIO Greg Jensen has been thinking about when machines might make for better investors than humans.
“When will machines write the rules, not just support the rules?” Jensen recalled asking himself in the early 2010s. “When will their intuition actually be better than human intuition?”
At the time, the technology could do “great pattern matching,” Jensen said, but “there was nothing like intuition.” The pieces he believed an artificial investor would need—reasoning, ways to diagnose its conclusions, and methods for working with limited data—had not yet come together.
So Jensen went looking for them.
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