The future of Wall Street is here as startups and brokers build AI agents to trade 24/7
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- Citizens' Devin Ryan projects that agentic finance could increase transaction volumes by at least 10x, with a retail investor who currently trades roughly twice a month potentially executing 20 trades a day under an agentic model.
- Podium Markets AI launched "Ivy," an assistant that analyzes portfolios across multiple brokerage accounts and generates recommendations but stops short of executing trades — "The AI informs, but the human decides," per co-founder and CEO Dirk Mueller-Ingrand.
- Robinhood introduced tools in May that let third-party AI agents connect with customer accounts, and Public is developing in-house AI agents to automate investing workflows, requiring users to review and approve every workflow before any trade is executed.
- Ryan predicts that by the end of next year, the majority of transaction activity by number of trades on some platforms will be done by agents, saying "this isn't 10 years away."
- Retail investors have spent three years testing general-purpose AI like Anthropic's Claude and ChatGPT for stock research since late 2022, with mixed results — one trader who tried an automated trading agent said he "was just losing money consistently," while another says Claude remains a research tool, not a replacement for his judgment.
Why it matters: If Ryan's forecast that agent-driven trades will dominate some platforms by end of next year holds, the source of brokerages' order flow shifts from humans to software, and Citizens' Ryan himself flags the resulting risk: ensuring an agent faithfully executes a client's stated goals — not just literal instructions — becomes a firm-level liability tied directly to best-execution and customer-best-interest obligations.
