There's a new trend in trading: ship something unfinished, wrap it in an AI narrative, call it a revolution.
Yesterday an announcement came on my CT on X:
"The first way to trade directly through ChatGPT and Claude."
That's how a certain platform introduced their “revolutionary” agentic trading service this week (guess what project :/>)
Lots of excitement. One problem - it's not true.
Same week, Robinhood launched agentic trading.
→ Both are MCP servers connected to a trading venue
→ Both let an AI place trades on your behalf.
Robinhood called it what it is - a feature. Another project called it a revolution.
That's the playbook: take a primitive that exists, wrap it in the hottest narrative available, claim "first," go viral. The audience gets the dopamine hit of feeling like they're witnessing something new. The product gets distribution it didn't earn.
The problem isn't that these products are bad. The problem is that the performance of innovation is being rewarded more than innovation itself.
When "we connected an LLM to an API" becomes a landmark launch, it trains the market to expect theatre instead of substance.
Agentic trading is genuinely the next alpha in our industry. AI executing cross-venue strategies, managing margin autonomously, acting on signals faster than any human - that's a real category worth building.
But it requires actual infrastructure, not a chat wrapper.
VOOI has had MCP trading live for a month now.
We didn't call it a breakthrough. It is just the next logical layer of what we were already building.
That's the difference between building a narrative and building a product.