Brokerages and startups spent millions building AI agents that trade 24/7. They automated the one thing humans already perfected: buying high and selling low.
The robots watch portfolios around the clock. They execute trades while you sleep. They panic-sell at 3am based on a Reddit post written by a teenager in Kazakhstan. Progress.
Retail investors are building their own AI agents now. A guy in Tampa taught his bot to read earnings reports and make split-second decisions. The bot immediately allocated 80% of his portfolio to a penny stock that manufactures flavored vape juice for cats. The future arrived and it's f*cking illiterate.
Wall Street calls this innovation. They're replacing junior analysts who worked 90-hour weeks with software that works 168-hour weeks. The software costs less and complains less. It also can't tell the difference between a legitimate SEC filing and a phishing email, but that's a problem for Q3.
The AI agents use machine learning to identify patterns in market data. They scan millions of data points per second. They calculate correlations humans could never spot. Then they buy Tesla calls because the chart looked like it was going up.
Some firms claim their AI agents outperform human traders. They ran a six-month backtest during the longest bull market in history. The robots made money. So did a dartboard. So did a hamster named Gerald who died in month three.
The technology automates investing tasks once handled by humans. Tasks like checking your account balance, watching it drop 40%, then stress-eating an entire sleeve of Oreos at your desk. Now the AI handles the first two steps and you skip straight to the cookies.
Nobody asked if we needed algorithms trading while we sleep, but we got them anyway, because the only thing better than losing money during market hours is losing it in three different time zones.
Photo by Larry Nalzaro on Unsplash
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