From Trading Algos to Trading Agents

HFT expert Irene Aldridge says AI Agents are the next trading evolution.

INTERVIEW

How Trading Is Becoming Autonomous

Five Minutes with Irene Aldridge, AbleMarkets CEO & HFT Author

Irene Aldridge wrote the book on high-frequency trading—literally, the Wiley textbook that's become the industry standard.

Now she says that AI agents are the next step in trading evolution.

Her new paper, "Agentic Artificial Intelligence in Finance: A Comprehensive Survey," argues that we've crossed a threshold from AI that predicts to AI that acts. She published the new research with her students from Cornell University, where she's been a visiting professor for the last nine years. 

AI agents are autonomous systems with objectives, memory, and the capacity to adapt—agents that decide what to trade, execute, and learn from the outcome. This differs from “traditional” AI which has typically relied on human-written code.

The practical result, she argues, is systems that mirror how trading floors actually work: one agent maximizing profit, another minimizing risk, a third handling compl…