AI agents make trading frictionless and boring

Buy me £50 of Apple stock.

I typed that out the other day. I could have spoken it but I was at the keyboard.

Claude -- or Marvin (thanks Sterling Chin) -- realised this meant pick up my Trading 212 API, check prices, confirm then execute the trade.

It did exactly that. Checked the share price and returned that to me and asked me to confirm.

Yes," I typed.

Executed.

2 seconds later the transaction was done.

That, dear reader, is how I want things.

Do you want me to DCA it, say, once a week?" prompted Marvin? (i.e. dollar-cost-average).

Yes."

I hadn't necessarily thought of doing that. I used to do this a lot with Apple (and a whole load of other stocks) but hadn't thought about that.

Marvin set me up a weekly recurring order on a Monday in another 2 seconds.

Then it setup a daily reminder to keep me updated on the portfolio value.

Now then, I recognise there are massive risks with this. For example, hack into the specific server that I'm experimenting with, and you might be able to redirect the £200 that I've deposited to test the realities of being able to trade 'via agent' thanks to the Trading 212 API.

(In case anyone's wondering about my apparent cavalier approach, my actual investments are managed in a very different manner at the moment.)

The point in testing with this is that I didn't want to wait for the mainstream to catch-up. Like many others, I wanted to see what it was like to begin to work with an Agent to trade. (I haven't done anything super-complex like many of my colleagues who're already pitting various models against each other to see which can make the most.)

I found the whole experience strangely boring.

I issued the command. The API string was compiled and sent within a second and Trading 212 confirmed the instruction almost instantly. Done.

No silly, laborious, very frustrating 'interfaces' to wade or tap through.

The question now is what should I be doing with it? I've long been a form of dollar-cost-averaging or ETFs when you don't have much interest or a care for specific market dynamics (or, like me, the expertise!) but I think the next task is to get my agent involved in the process.

I wonder what would happen if I asked it to trade across the week for me?

Thank you to the team at Trading 212 for setting up their API!

"(If you're experimenting yourself, my recommendation is to test first with the demo API that the team have put together!)