If you invest extensively in the U.S. stock market, there’s a good chance you’ve had at least some exposure to artificial intelligence. Depending on where you invest, AI could also help you manage your portfolio.
Online brokerages are rolling out agent trading, where AI agents perform aspects of portfolio management. This is a bit more advanced than robo-advisors, which automatically build an investor’s portfolio based on preferences such as risk tolerance. AI agents help you build investment strategies from plain language prompts and execute trades on your behalf as market conditions change.
Users of online trading platforms like Robinhood and Webull can leverage AI to monitor market movements, build strategies, and automate certain authorized tasks.
It might sound as simple as telling Claude or ChatGPT to buy and sell stocks and make money as they see fit, but it’s not.
“I don’t think that’s how it really works,” said Abhishek Fatepuria, Robinhood’s vice president of securities products and customer care. The company rolled out agent trading in May 2026, allowing investors to link third-party large-scale language models to their Robinhood accounts to perform actions such as portfolio rebalancing and market analysis based on publicly available information on the internet and users’ portfolio history. The company announced an AI agent natively integrated into the Robinhood app in September, but it’s not yet available to all customers.
Investors still have to make their own assumptions about how their investments will return. Agents won’t do it for them, Fatepuria said. But proxy trading tools like Robinhood can help individuals think through and test their assumptions, he says.
“It can take a huge amount of work to do that, and it can take a huge amount of work just to vet that hypothesis, and that’s exactly what this product is about,” Fatepuria said. “It’s not a substitute for having a hypothesis.”
Execution, not prediction
Shridhar Rathore agrees that AI agents will not do miracles for your portfolio.
“It’s not magic. It’s not going to invent anything for you,” he says.
The 45-year-old IT professional from Charlotte, North Carolina, began experimenting with agent trading in March 2026. He is a self-taught investor who has been actively trading stocks, cryptocurrencies, and options strategies for nearly 20 years. As the portfolio grew, he says, it became more time-consuming to manage.
Rasool began automating some investment tasks in August 2025. He built a program that tracked a watchlist of 40 to 50 stocks and sent email alerts whenever the stock price reached the price he planned to buy or sell. The AI-generated summary of market news for that stock was then used to help decide the next action, such as placing a limit order (instruction to buy or sell a security at a specific price) in an online brokerage account.
Now, AI agents are helping to streamline that process, providing analysis of option trades and helping determine potential risks, allowing him to consider and decide on trades himself.
He subscribes to Arora Report, an investment newsletter, and uses its analysis to inform his decision-making. Without the information from the Arora Report and the investment knowledge he has cultivated over the years, agent trading likely would not have been of much use to him, he says, because agents are more about taking actions than predicting the performance of assets. After all, even the most powerful AI agents cannot predict the future.
Blake Anderson, director of portfolio management at financial services firm Carson Group, says AI can help you move quickly in the short term, but if you’re investing with a long-term strategy in mind, the time saved won’t make much of a difference.
“AI may perhaps help reduce transaction latency, but investment expectations may not change much,” he says. “As a fundamental investor, using AI to execute a trade will not change the long-term profit potential of the acquired business.”
Agency trading risks
Generally, you assume some level of risk by owning stocks, cryptocurrencies, or other investable assets. Allowing AI agents to influence or make investment decisions can introduce additional risks as the technology can malfunction or make decisions that are inconsistent with investment goals, Rasool says.
Robinhood has several guardrails in place to protect investors, including allowing agents to operate only in separate, dedicated brokerage accounts. Investors using the app’s agent with the broker’s default settings must approve all trading decisions. This feature can be turned off, but some transactions may still require approval.
While Rasool has been happy with the agent deal so far, he didn’t want to let the technology company make the final deal decisions on his investments alone.
Agents “can make your trading experience easier, there’s no question about that,” he says. “But having[an agent]make investment decisions is where humans can lose money if they’re not careful. They need to provide some underlying truth, and they need to make sure humans are always involved when it comes to execution.”
He added that LLMs are known to cause “hallucinations,” an industry term for bots fabricating information or misinterpreting user instructions, so using agent trading can be risky if you don’t have solid investment experience.
The potential benefit of using AI in investing may be just that. You can gather more information about a particular investment, Anderson says. However, in addition to checking your own biases, make sure your LLM is getting information from reliable sources.
“If investors can use AI to understand businesses in a different way and expand their knowledge, they can think critically about a wider variety of stocks and potentially find discounted opportunities,” he said.
