Wall Street startups and brokers are developing AI agents for autonomous 24/7 trading.
AI & Agents ·
Major financial services firms and AI startups are building autonomous trading agents designed to execute investment decisions around the clock without human intervention on each trade. Podium Markets AI has developed an assistant called Ivy that analyzes portfolios and generates recommendations, though users currently retain final decision authority. Larger brokerages including Robinhood and Public are pursuing similar paths—Robinhood has opened its platform to third-party AI agents, while Public is developing in-house agents to automate investing workflows.
The shift represents a transition from AI-assisted research to fully delegated execution. Rather than deploying fully autonomous systems immediately, firms are adopting gradual rollouts where AI informs decisions that humans ultimately approve. Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens, expects this capability to arrive within years, not decades, and envisions agents managing not just trades but taxes, cash balances, and mortgages aligned to investor goals. Ryan projects agentic finance could drive transaction volumes up tenfold, with a retail investor potentially trading 20 times daily instead of twice monthly.
The extent to which regulatory frameworks will accommodate autonomous trading, and whether retail investors will embrace delegating investment decisions to AI, remain uncertain. The technology builds on three years of retail experimentation with general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT for research, though those results have proven mixed in reliability.