If you invest broadly in the U.S. stock market, there’s a good chance you have at least some exposure to artificial intelligence. And depending on where you invest, AI could be helping you manage your portfolio, too.
Online brokerages are rolling out agentic trading, in which AI agents perform aspects of portfolio management. It goes a bit further than robo-advisors, which automatically build portfolios for investors based on preferences like risk tolerance. AI agents can help you build investment strategies from plain language prompts and execute trades on your behalf amid shifting market conditions.
Users of online trading platforms like Robinhood and Webull can tap AI to help monitor market movement, build strategies and automate certain approved tasks.
If that sounds as simple as telling Claude or ChatGPT to go make you money by buying and selling stocks as they see fit, it’s not.
“I don’t think that’s really how it works,” says Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of brokerage product and customer care at Robinhood. The company rolled out agentic trading in May 2026, allowing investors to link a third-party large language model to their Robinhood account to perform actions like portfolio rebalancing and market analysis based on a publicly available information across the internet and a user’s portfolio history. It announced AI agents integrated natively on the Robinhood app in September, but they are not available to all customers yet.
Investors still have to come up with their own hypothesis for how an investment could benefit them; an agent won’t do that for them, Fatehpuria says. Agentic trading tools like Robinhood’s, however, can help individuals think through and test their assumptions, he says.
“Executing that can require enormous work, or even vetting that hypothesis can require enormous work, and that’s really what this product is built to do,” Fatehpuria says. “It’s not meant to be a substitute for having a hypothesis.”
Execution, not prediction
Shridhar Rathore agrees that an AI agent is not going to 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, started experimenting with agentic trading in March 2026. He’s a self-taught investor who’s been actively trading for around 20 years, including stock, cryptocurrency and options strategies. As his portfolio grew, it became quite time-consuming to manage, he says.
Rathore started automating some investment tasks in August 2025. He built a program that tracked his watchlist of 40 to 50 stocks and emailed him an alert whenever a stock hit a price at which he planned to buy or sell shares. He then used an AI-generated summary of the market news around that stock to help decide his next move, like setting up a limit order — an instruction to buy or sell a security at a certain price — in his online brokerage account, for example.
Now, AI agents have helped streamline that process for him, delivering analyses for options trades and helping him determine his potential risk so he can review and make trading decisions himself.
He pays for a subscription to Arora Report, an investment newsletter, and uses that analysis to help inform his decisions. Without the information from Arora Report and the investing savvy he’s picked up over the years, agentic trading likely wouldn’t be of much use to him, he says, because the agents are more for executing actions than predicting how assets will perform. Even the most powerful AI agent can’t predict the future, after all.
AI could help you move quicker in the short-term, but if you’re investing with a long-term strategy in mind, those saved minutes won’t make much of a difference, says Blake Anderson, director of portfolio management at Carson Group, a financial services firm.
“AI may likely help reduce trading latency, but investing expectations may not differ much,” he says. “As a fundamental investor, using AI to execute a trade likely won’t change the long-term earnings potential of the business being bought.”
Risks with agentic trading
You generally assume some level of risk by owning stocks, crypto or other investable assets. Letting an AI agent influence or make investing decisions for you can invite more risk, given the technology could malfunction or make a decision that isn’t aligned with your investment goals, Rathore says.
Robinhood has some guardrails in place to protect investors, like only allowing agents to operate in a separate, dedicated brokerage account. Investors using the app’s agents on the brokerage’s default settings have to approve every trade decision. That feature can be turned off, though some trades may still require approval.
Even though Rathore has been pleased with agentic trading thus far, he wouldn’t let the tech make final trade decisions for his investments on its own.
Agents can “make your trading experience easier, there is no doubt about it,” he says. “But [letting agents] make investment decisions, that’s where people can lose money if they are not careful. They have to provide some ground truth, and they have to make sure that for the execution, the human is in the loop.”
Using agentic trading without solid investing experience can be risky, he adds, because of the way LLMs are known to hallucinate, the industry term for when bots make up information or otherwise misinterpret the user’s directions.
A potential benefit of using AI to invest could be just that — to gather more information about a given investment, Anderson says. But make sure your LLM is getting that information from trusted sources and not just confirming your own biases.
“If investors can use AI to understand a business differently than the prevailing narrative or expand their knowledge, then they may be able to think critically about a wider variety of stocks and potentially find discounted opportunities,” he says.
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