TraderStacks

3 platforms, 3 ways to fence in an AI agent. IBKR Autonomous Trading: a separate AI Partition, capped at 10% of equity and $25K total. MetaTrader 5: AI trading allowed, prohibited or manual confirm only. eToro connectors: read-only, or every action sent to you for approval.

Wiring a TradingView alert to a broker API? Put your own server in the middle. Per TradingView's docs, webhooks need 2FA, only ports 80 and 443 work, and requests cancel after 3 seconds. So answer fast, allowlist their 4 sender IPs, cap size, drop duplicates and log everything.

"Never take big trades" in a prompt is a request, not a limit. Real limits live outside the model: max order size, a daily loss cap, orders per hour, an allowed symbols list and a kill switch. IBKR says order frequency and max order size limits are planned for its AI Partitions.

Connecting an AI agent to your brokerage or exchange account? Six boxes to tick before it touches a live account: read only first, a separate account, small capped funds, your own limits, preview every order, and know where the off switch is.

Where AI actually fits in a trading workflow: research and review are where it saves the most time. Planning and execution stay with you. Let it summarize the news and audit your journal. Keep the rules and the trades in your hands.

A new benchmark had nine large language models run full quant workflows on historical stock data, with trading costs included. Per reports on Einsia AI's Quant-Arena, none of them beat a simple equal-weight portfolio. Use AI to speed up research and testing, not as a signal.

Per Axios, big US banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo are restricting third party AI agents that log in with customers' own passwords. The line they're drawing works for traders too: read access first, write access only with guardrails.

Rolling out an AI agent on a trading account? Do it in 4 stages: read only, paper trade and log every order, a small capped account with order preview on, then a weekly review against your own rules. Building it is the easy part. Trust takes longer.

4 ways to connect an AI to your trading account, and the question to ask about each. Shared login: skip it. Broker API key: which scopes? Official agent or MCP connection: what can it do without asking? Read only connector: can it ever trade without you?

3 places to paper trade an AI-built strategy before it goes near real money. Alpaca: free paper environment, separate API keys from live. TradingView: Paper Trading for every user, no deposit. IBKR: needs an approved live account, $1M simulated buying power.

AI can write and backtest a strategy in minutes now. Checking it still takes you. Before you trust the curve: costs included, tested on data it never saw, no lookahead, compared against just holding, and paper traded with every order logged.

Idea to paper account in 5 steps: write the rules in plain words, let AI write the code, read it yourself, backtest with costs, then paper trade on separate keys and review the log. Paper isn't live: Alpaca's docs say its simulator skips market impact and latency slippage.

Coinbase now lets you connect Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and other agents to your account. Before you do, set up three things: a separate portfolio, only the funds you're OK putting at risk, and limits you choose yourself. Coinbase gives the same advice. Setup first, prompts second.

A simple AI trading journal workflow: Export your fills as a CSV at the end of each week. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT. Ask: "Where did I break my own rules?" You're not asking it what to trade. You're asking it to check your habits.

Charting, screener, journal, backtester, alerts. Most traders pay for 4 or 5 tools that overlap. Before you add another one, write down what each tool does for you that no other tool does. Whatever has nothing on its line can go.