Retail Investors Harness AI Agents to Automate Trading and Portfolios
Retail investors are increasingly turning to AI agents like Claude and Codex to autonomously manage stock portfolios and complex options trading strategies.
Like many senior Wall Street portfolio managers, Colin Eadsman has a team that helps him closely monitor his investments. There is Alex, who constantly scans the market for promising stocks and exchange-traded funds. There is Sarah, who reviews open positions daily before the market close. And there is Elena, who prepares a weekly performance report. There is just one difference: Alex, Sarah, and Elena are not analysts drinking endless coffee and pulling all-nighters in front of computer screens. They are Claude agents working around the clock from Eadsman’s laptop, which sits on his kitchen table. So far, their performance has outpaced most of the accounts he manages on his own.
"It works pretty much like a hedge fund," Eadsman said of his artificial intelligence-managed portfolio, which is kept in an account separate from his other investments on the trading platform Robinhood. The hair stylist and stay-at-home dad said that giving names to the agents helps him keep track of the tasks assigned to them. Americans already use artificial intelligence agents to book vacations, draft emails, and automate other tasks. Now, retail investors can also hand over control of their stock portfolios. Several trading platforms, including Robinhood and Webull, have launched tools that make it easy to connect to Claude, Codex, and other agents. Once connected, the agent can buy and sell assets independently.
A New Era of Automated Retail Trading
Industry executives predict that the technology will transform the landscape of retail investing. Traders say it allows them to make objective decisions, process massive amounts of data at a scale beyond human capability, and achieve impressive returns without tracking the market at all. Skeptics worry it could expose inexperienced investors to new hazards. "For retail investors, this is a real breakthrough," said Irene Aldridge, a former engineer and quant trader who researches the intersection of artificial intelligence and financial markets. However, she added, "Use it at your own risk."
Professional investors have had access for years to powerful computers and algorithmic tools that can scan data, identify market signals, and execute trades automatically, sometimes within milliseconds. About a decade ago, The Wall Street Journal illustrated how quantitative traders, known as quants, were taking over Wall Street. For retail investors, such sophisticated strategies were previously accessible only to a technologically savvy few. Today, with the help of artificial intelligence tools, they can build an automated trading strategy based on simple prompts. For example, investors can instruct agents to buy energy stocks when oil prices rise, sell an options contract the moment it yields a certain return, or even monitor a president's social media posts for signals that might affect the market. The ultimate goal, industry executives say, is a team of agents that can manage your investments like a group of small portfolio managers, allowing brokerage clients to transition to full automation, from options trading to tax-loss harvesting.
Small Hedge Funds for Everyday Investors
Many Americans already practice a "set it and forget it" method for tasks like buying index funds or reinvesting dividends. According to them, trading via artificial intelligence agents makes it possible to apply this approach even to the most advanced day-trading strategies. "These people are turning into small hedge funds," said Neil Macdonald, CEO of Moomoo US. The platform launched AI-agent trading in April, and Macdonald estimates that by the end of the year, about 20% of the platform's trading volume could be executed by agents. "It's a revolution."
This represents a significant shift for retail investors, who play an increasingly prominent role on Wall Street. Just over a decade ago, ordinary Americans were only beginning to buy stocks using their smartphones. By 2026, they have driven post-selloff recoveries, propelled a group of chip stocks to record highs, and helped make the largest-ever IPO a success. Now, individuals can act in the market with greater precision than ever, said Dean Arnes, a 19-year-old investor and content creator, all without being glued to screens. Arnes shared that he uses an agent to automatically execute a specific options strategy that would otherwise be nearly impossible to implement. His Codex agent scans massive amounts of options trading flow data to identify large, aggressive trades likely coming from institutional investors. The agent then scores the trades based on various factors and enters high-probability positions to ride the momentum.
Emotional Detachment and Market Risks
Retail investors have long been dubbed "dumb money" for their tendency to chase market rallies or panic-sell during downturns. Whether this stereotype remains true or not, investors who have experimented with agent trading say one of the greatest benefits of autonomous execution is removing emotion from investment decisions. "I'm not sitting there wondering if I'm being too greedy," said Angel Gutierrez, a full-time options trader who built an agent that scores contracts to determine when to sell. Others worry the technology could amplify herd behavior, which has previously caused losses for some traders. A yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when artificial intelligence models were asked to build a general investment strategy, they recommended concentrated portfolios, highly priced stocks, and heavily media-covered companies. "Artificial intelligence takes risks, recommends a narrow range of assets, focuses on specific sectors, and does not appear to perform better" than passive benchmarks, the researchers wrote. Widespread use of agents scanning the same publicly available data pools could also increase market volatility, Aldridge warned, as agents might crowd into similar positions.
Platform executives emphasized that their clients use agents prudently and that built-in risk management safeguards are in place. At Robinhood, AI-managed portfolios are kept in dedicated, separate accounts, and alerts are sent for every transaction. Eadsman, Arnes, and Gutierrez reported no significant losses or instances of agents running out of control. For Eadsman, the promise of the technology justifies experimenting with something still unproven, looking forward to a day when AI trading is simple enough for his 57-year-old mother to earn extra retirement income through automated markets.
