# AI agents may drive trading while most assets stay invested long-term

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/ai-agents-may-drive-trading-while-most-assets-stay-invested/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Vlad Tenev](https://realalpha.app/people/vlad-tenev/) · Vlad Tenev is co-founder and CEO of Robinhood. · Co-founded Robinhood in 2013, then steered it from a $500M loss in 2023 to a $1.1B profit.
- Host: [Alex Heath](https://realalpha.app/people/alex-heath/) · Founder & host, Sources · Left The Verge to start Sources in 2025; it has made over $1M since, mostly from sponsors.
- Show: Sources
- Episode: [Robinhood’s CEO on letting AI trade your money](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/), Oct 13, 2026
- Moment: 9:03 to 15:03 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/ai-agents-may-drive-trading-while-most-assets-stay-invested/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=543

## Quote

> “I think a very **large portion of the volume** will be generated by AI agents.”
> — [Vlad Tenev](https://realalpha.app/people/vlad-tenev/) at [9:35](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=575) · Sources

## Takeaways

1. Agents can trade around the clock and across asset classes.
2. Tenev expects agent-led trading activity to grow.
3. He distinguishes trading volume from long-term assets held.

## About this segment

Vlad Tenev expects agents to generate a large share of retail trading because they can run continuously and handle assets in parallel. He expects most customer assets to remain long-term holdings.

From “Robinhood’s CEO on letting AI trade your money”, Oct 13, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[9:06](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=546) created to use AI to do autonomous trading, right? And it's a really interesting category and something I've been thinking a lot about and the idea of AI managing money for people and not just, you know, sophisticated people, but everyday retail investors. And you're doing that now with this. I'm curious, like, where you think this is going? Are we going to a world where most people have AI make their, not only their decisions, but their trades, execution, all of that, have AI do that for them? Do you think that this is inevitable? I think a very large portion of the volume will be generated by AI agents. And I think that's because they don't have a lot of the limitations that we have as human traders. They can be up 24-7, right? They can be multi-asset class simultaneously. So one of the things that are challenging for humans using our Robinhood

[10:04](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=604) app directly is you have to go to different screens to get different asset classes. The more things we add to the app, to some degree, the more work we have to do to make the experience coherent. So for example, we've got, we started with stocks and it was very simple stock experience, but then we added options, crypto. Now we have futures, prediction markets. In overseas and some of our other products, we've got DeFi with Robinhood chain, decentralized finance products and assets. We've got perpetual futures, banking, retirement, advisory. So it's a lot of stuff.

[10:38](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=638) And that complexity is a challenge for humans, but for agents, it's just more context, more opportunity, more trade ideas. And so, you know, we've started seeing the earliest iterations of Robinhood agents. We see people constructing option strategies, right? And it's like, I have a very specific thing that I want to do, trade that I want to put on. Maybe it's an iron condor or something. And, you know, it's just, I can tell my agent and it'll take the data. It'll put it together. It makes that really, really easy. And that's kind of a automation use case. It's like removing a paper cut. But you imagine we plug it into all assets. We plug it into all data sources and you'll see the use case is getting more complex. The strategy is getting a lot richer.

[11:29](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=689) Yeah, I see a world where a large portion of the trading volume for an individual investor, for our customer base writ large, is generated by AI agents. But that doesn't necessarily mean the vast majority of the assets are going to be agentically trading. I think the vast majority of the assets will probably be held long term, but the trading activity will probably go more and more towards a Gentic.

[11:58](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=718) It's an interesting time. too because people are getting used to products like Muse, Instinct, et cetera, making purchases for them agentically and using AI to save money, pay for things. So I feel like your timing's actually pretty good because the average everyday AI user is starting to realize like, oh, I can use AI to interact with my money. Yeah, absolutely. In a way that six months ago no one was really doing. I think, yeah, there was still that gap of I don't really feel comfortable, you know, giving my AI my email or, you know, the keys to my brokerage account. I think we're going through the shift. And it happened with other new technologies too. I mean, I remember when the internet first became a big thing and people were very nervous punching their credit card number into a website. Yeah, I remember. Didn't feel secure. It was like a safety concern. And

[12:56](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=776) it became clear that it's actually more secure than handing your credit card over at a brick and mortar register same with mobile you know when we got started with mobile it was still the the overton window hadn't shifted to mobile being your default way of managing your finances still people thought of it as it's where i play games or do not serious stuff so the idea of my finances being on on my phone seemed sacrilegious almost.

[13:24](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=804) Yeah. Yeah, I think we'll see the same thing here. We're starting to see it. And so we're probably early, but I think the time is soon. When your team was showing me the demo, I was thinking too, this really gets at the original mission you had for the company, democratizing finance, because AI, those paper cuts you described, putting on complex trades, all these things, potentially a lot more people could be doing more complex things with their money and not even needing to fully understand all the complexities.

[13:56](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=836) Yeah, and the AI could explain it to you. Yeah. You know, much better than reading a book. The interface becomes simple. Yeah, I mean, options trading is probably a great example. It's so complex. Options trading is very difficult. And you all had, I think, still do have the best interface in terms of learning options. But I got to be honest, it still is complex. Yeah, particularly if you go into these multi-leg strategies.

[14:16](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=856) I mean, we can do what we can to illustrate and say, okay, well, this trade, you know, you've got limited upside, cap downside, you know, and we'll show that graphically. And, you know, we can generate all of those visualizations and make them available to agents as well. What the agents can do is take your intent. It's like, hey, I want to put on a trade for this stock. I want to cap my downside.

[14:42](https://realalpha.app/v/rkTMQ3oHzFE/?t=882) I want to have, you know, unlimited upside, those sorts of things. and it'll actually, they do a pretty good job of constructing the right legs of the options trade for you. I'm curious where you think the edge will be in investing and trading as AI proliferates. I mean, you started this conversation by saying, we're always trying to play catch up with the big guys,