WSJ: Retail Investors Vibe-Code Trading Agents With Claude and Codex, Moomoo Sees 'Mini Hedge Funds'

The Wall Street Journal reports that retail investors are connecting brokerage accounts to Claude and Codex agents to auto-run trading strategies, with Moomoo U.S. CEO Neil McDonald calling them 'mini hedge funds' and predicting agents will drive a substantial share of platform trades by year-end. Robinhood and Webull have shipped features to plug AI agents into accounts, with separate accounts and trade notifications as guardrails. Cited research found that AI-built strategies skewed toward concentrated portfolios of high-valuation, media-attention stocks without beating passive benchmarks.