The Agentic Trading Boom ...What Does It Mean? Who Are The Winners?

Good afternoon everyone…

If you have not heard of ‘Agentic Trading’ yet, you will be hearing it endlessly for the forseeable future.

I find myself in the center of this trend because Stocktwits of course and our seed investments in Alpaca (fund 3), Fiscal.ai (fund 4) and FREC.com (fund 4).

Etoro was one of the first brokerages to offer agentic trading. Today, Coinbase launched it.

Robinhood has also entered the ‘agentic trading’ business. They do a great job explaining it here.

One term you will hear along with agentic trading is MCP.

What’s an MCP?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to external apps and services. Instead of just answering questions, an AI with MCP access can take actions on your behalf.

Why is it a perfect storm for this ‘agentic trading’ boom?

1. It starts with AI of course. Thanks Nvidia, Open AI, Google and Anthropic.

2. It helps that companies like Fiscal.ai now exist. Humans and agents need this modern financial data platform. It is trusted by the worlds leading public market investors. Fiscal.ai along with Chat GPT and Claude have commoditized almost all financial research. Just today, Fiscal shared 22 prompts to build your own AI analyst.

3. Of course the cost of transactions has dropped to near zero thanks to technology and companies like Robinhood and Alpaca.

4. Social networks…love them or hate them, they spread information and information is data and data equals trades.

5. Prediction markets are in their infancy.

6. Hyperliquid.

7. The SEC is in hibernation.

8. The Apple Mac Mini and I guess Dell.

9. Millions of investor and trader toolsets are being launched. One I mentioned a few days back is Portfolio Genius which was built by our Stocktwits CTO.

10. Trillions in capital about to be redistributed post SpaceX, Open AI and Anthropic IPO and these people are geeks and native to AI and degeneracy.

So where is the ‘Alpha’ in this agentic trading boom?

Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison and Mark Cuban say the alpha and gold is in proprietary datasets. Not to toot our own horn but that means Stocktwits. I am not a quant so I could never truly explain all the value and alpha I was seeing flow through my feeds on Stocktwits. Our MCP (launching very soon) changes all that. The MCP will open up our platform, community and data to a much wider audience (humans and agents) seeking to interact with our unique data and sentiment.

Beyond proprietary datasets, I consider this boom an extension or hyper boost to my ‘degenerate economy’. My index is here. I continue to keep it simple and focus on the arms dealers and pipes. I believe we are in a massive TAM (total addressable market) expansion for trading and investing. For example…in 1999, Amazon went public at $438 million. The ‘retail’ investor market was tiny. We were huddled together on Etrade and Yahoo Finnace. Tomorrow SpaceX goes public at nearly $2 trillion. The ‘retail’ investor is still on Etrade ya (now Morgan Stanley) and Yahoo Finance still sure. But because of the internet, social networks, API’s, smartphones, AI and the cloud, the retail investor and their ‘agents’ are is in every corner of the earth.

On the private side you can follow along the on Alpaca’s Twitter stream for news of all the companies hooking themselves up to their API’s around the globe.

How do I get started with Agentic Trading in the meantime?

It is MUCH easier than you think.

Here is a simple search ‘Alpaca Agentic Trading’.

If you have a Robinhood account you will have already noticed the invite if you are a ‘gold’ member…

Have a great rest of the day.