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Retail Investors Increasingly Delegate Stock Trading Decisions to Autonomous AI Agents

Retail investors are increasingly delegating buy and sell decisions to AI agents, a trend that lowers technical barriers for everyday traders. Brokerages such as Robinhood, Webull, and Moomoo have introduced features allowing users to connect AI systems like Claude and and Codex to their accounts. These agents can autonomously analyze market signals, scan for institutional trades, and execute orders based on natural-language instructions. This shift provides individual investors with access to sophisticated strategies previously reserved for quantitative funds. For example, a 19-year-old investor, Dean Arens, uses a Codex agent to score and execute high-confidence options trades, which helped grow his account balance from $3,000 to $8,000 in several months. While AI agents offer the psychological advantage of emotionless trading, research from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that AI-designed portfolios often favor high-valuation, media-heavy stocks and may not outperform simple index-tracking strategies. Additionally, experts warn that if many agents scan the same public data simultaneously, they could crowd into similar positions and increase market volatility.

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