What Is Agentic Trading? The 2026 Explainer

Agentic trading is the industry term for AI that reasons about markets and acts on them — placing, managing, and rebalancing real orders in a brokerage account. It is the difference between a tool that tells you what to buy and a tool that buys it.

The definition that matters

For this directory, a tool is agentic when it closes the loop: the AI does not just generate a signal or a thesis, it can execute orders (with the guardrails you set). Everything below that bar — screeners, signal engines, research copilots — is AI trading, but not agentic.

2026 was the year the distinction went mainstream:

• Robinhood launched Agentic Trading on May 27, 2026 — 50,000 accounts and millions of dollars in daily execution volume within weeks.
• Public called itself the world's first agentic brokerage on March 31, 2026.
• Webull shipped an MCP server in April 2026, letting external agents trade through its rails.
• SoFi acquired Composer and shipped its agentic layer on June 23, 2026.

Two architectures

1. Bring your own agent (MCP). Brokers like Alpaca, Interactive Brokers, Webull, and Tradier expose a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. You connect Claude, ChatGPT, or a custom agent, and it trades through the broker's infrastructure. Maximum flexibility, maximum responsibility.
2. Build in-app. Public, SoFi/Composer, and Robinhood embed the agent inside their own apps. Guardrails, disclosures, and risk reviews are part of the product surface rather than an API contract.

Why it matters now

Two things collided: LLMs finally got reliable enough to reason about market data, and brokers standardized agent access via MCP. The result is a new category of software — and a directory to organize it.