Best Brokers for AI Trading Agents

Company	Overall	Minimum Deposit	Stock Trades	Options (Per Contract)
Interactive Brokers		$0.00	$0.00	$0.65

Interactive Brokers keeps order submission outside the AI session. Connect an AI tool to your account and it can analyze your portfolio, research positions, monitor risk, and draft trade instructions in plain language. Converting an instruction into a live order happens on an IBKR platform, where you review it and submit it yourself. An agent that misreads your intent, or acts on something buried in a document you asked it to summarize, has no path to the market on its own. Robinhood, Webull, Public, and Moomoo all let the agent place the order itself.

Connecting your account: IBKR built the integration on MCP from launch. Until late July, it worked only through the certified connector marketplaces for ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. It now accepts any MCP-compatible tool, including Claude Code, Cursor, Perplexity and Windsurf, with Gemini support announced. Setup takes the connector URL, a login through IBKR's own secure screen, and authorization for one account. No API keys or passwords change hands, and each authorization covers a single account rather than everything under your login.

What the agent can reach: Range matters more here than at a broker with a narrower lineup. One account reaches more than 170 markets, so the questions you can ask span asset classes rather than US equities alone. Rate sensitivity across your holdings, implied volatility on every position, currency exposure if the dollar weakens, portfolio impact from an index drawdown. Reviewing drafted instructions works across Client Portal, IBKR Desktop, GlobalTrader, IBKR Mobile and Trader Workstation.

IBKR's own AI tools: These sit inside the platforms and are separate from the MCP integration. Ask IBKR answers account questions directly. I asked what my exposure to the tech sector was and got an answer grounded in my own holdings rather than a generic explanation. The AI news summaries were the bigger time saver, condensing dozens of headlines into a short list of why a stock was actually moving. The natural-language screeners search more than 70,000 global stocks.

Cost: Nothing extra for the integration, no separate AI brokerage account, and no configuration work. IBKR Lite charges $0 commission on US-listed stocks and ETFs, while Pro charges per share and prioritizes execution quality. Margin runs 4.140% to 6.140%, well below what most competitors charge on smaller balances.

Jessica's take

"I rank Interactive Brokers first partly for its confirmation step, not for what its agent can do. Review-then-submit is slower than telling an agent to buy and watching it happen, and if that is what you want, Robinhood and Webull will give it to you. Personally, I prefer an AI mistake to cost me a deleted draft instead of a filled order. For real money, in a product category this new, I will take the extra click."

Jessica Inskip
Director of Investor Research

Interactive Brokers offers one of the most comprehensive watchlists in the industry, available on both its web and desktop trading platforms. This screenshot highlights the desktop experience, where investors can track real-time quotes, market data, and customizable columns across multiple asset classes.

Company	Overall	Minimum Deposit	Stock Trades	Options (Per Contract)
Webull		$0.00	$0.00	$0.00

Webull gives you four ways to connect and the most granular controls of any broker here. A hosted server at api.webull.com/mcp handles ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Codex, and Kiro with no setup beyond pasting a URL. A local server runs on your own machine through uvx, so your keys never leave your device. There are also standalone agent skills for assistants that can run shell commands, and a CLI for scheduled jobs. Unlike Interactive Brokers, the agent places orders itself rather than drafting instructions for you to submit.

Guardrails you configure: You can cap the dollar value of a single order, cap share quantity, and restrict trading to a whitelist of symbols you choose. The local server ships with a $10,000 notional limit and a 1,000-share cap already set. A read-only mode disables the trading tools entirely, leaving the agent with account and market data access only. Preview endpoints let it show you order details before submitting, though Webull recommends that step rather than enforcing it. Connections unlink with one click.

What the agent can trade: Stocks, ETFs, options including multi-leg strategies, futures, crypto and event contracts. It handles combo orders such as OTO, OCO and OTOCO, and algorithmic orders using TWAP, VWAP and POV. That is a wider execution toolkit than any other broker in this guide hands an AI agent, and it is why Webull suits active traders especially well.

Test before going live: The local server defaults to Webull's sandbox rather than production, so you can watch an agent work a full session before it touches real money. Paper trading is already one of the things I like most about Webull, and the same discipline carries over here.

Cost and the catch: No commission on stocks, ETFs, or options contracts, which matters more than usual when an agent can place multi-leg options orders. Futures run $1.25 per contract and there is no minimum deposit. A market data subscription applies if your agent needs quotes. The real concern is support since Webull finished last of all brokers in this year's customer service testing, with calls that never came off hold. If an agent does something you did not expect, that is who you will be calling.

Webull’s trading platform brings everything together in one clean, customizable view, perfect for making fast, informed decisions. Here, with AAPL selected, you can see a real-time chart, a pre-filled limit order ticket, and a detailed quote panel that includes analyst ratings and sentiment breakdowns.

Company	Overall	Minimum Deposit	Stock Trades	Options (Per Contract)
Public.com		$20.00	$0.00	$0.00

Public.com runs two separate agent products, and the difference matters more than anything else here. A hosted MCP server connects Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for conversational trading. Agentic Brokerage is Public's own automation, where you describe a strategy in plain language, confirm it once, and it runs on its own from then on.

Connecting an outside AI: The hosted server sits at mcp.public.com/mcp. Claude authorizes through the browser, Perplexity takes an API key, and ChatGPT can require extra approval before write actions. Preflight endpoints price single-leg and multi-leg orders before submission. The agent reaches stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and your tax lots. Option Greeks and strategy quotes come through the API even though the app's own options chain omits Greeks and bid-ask spreads, so an agent can see data the interface will not show you.

Agents run unattended: Public's disclosure is direct about this. Once you confirm and activate an Agent, Public will not alert you before a pending transaction and will not wait for your confirmation before executing it. Executed transactions cannot be reversed. You approve the strategy, not the trades, and that is the loosest approval model of the five brokers here.

Published limits are ceilings, not guardrails: Public documents maximums of 10,000 shares or $5 million on equities and 1,999 option contracts. Those are venue caps, not safety settings. Unlike Webull, there is no dollar limit you can impose on your own agent, and no sandbox to rehearse in, because Public has no paper trading.

Where it earns the spot: The Public tool Generated Assets won our top industry award for AI innovation. You describe a theme in plain language and get a backtested index you can fund. I found it useful for brainstorming, though it compares growth better than total return since dividends are not fully reflected. Public also publishes an official agent skill for OpenClaw, so a self-hosted assistant running on WhatsApp or Telegram can monitor and trade your account. Trading is free on stocks, ETFs, and options, though advanced data and extended-hours trading need Premium at $10 a month unless you hold $50,000.

Public.com’s Markets screen on mobile looks nice. It has a clean layout, is easy to scan, and shows the major indices and top movers. That said, it’s definitely on the basic side. The earnings calendar is pretty limited, and if you’re looking for deeper insight or tools, you might find yourself wanting more. Still, it’s a nice starting point for a quick market check.

Company	Overall	Minimum Deposit	Stock Trades	Options (Per Contract)
Robinhood		$0.00	$0.00	$0.00

Robinhood is the only broker here that gives your agent its own account. Agentic Trading requires opening a separate self-directed individual account, and the agent can place trades only there. Your primary account, your IRA and everything else stay closed to it. If an agent misfires, the damage is capped by whatever you funded that one account with.

Company	Overall	Minimum Deposit	Stock Trades	Options (Per Contract)
TradeStation		$0.00	$0.00	$0.80

TradeStation shipped the first MCP server at a U.S. broker in January 2026 and won our Annual Award for #1 Innovation for it. It also sets the highest bar to entry in this guide. Access requires a minimum eligible balance of $10,000 and a paid Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus subscription, billed by the AI provider rather than TradeStation. No other broker here asks for either. The account itself still has no minimum, so the gate applies only to the MCP connection.

This is the path most people should take. Nothing to install, no code, and your broker password never reaches the AI tool. In Claude, open Settings, select Connectors, then Add custom connector and paste the broker's URL. ChatGPT and Grok work the same way, and a broker like Interactive Brokers also appears in their certified connector directories, so you can add it without a URL at all.

Interactive Brokers provides an official integration with Claude via a Connector. In the settings of Claude Desktop, each action available to Claude that accesses your IBKR account can be adjusted to always be allowed, require permission each time, or be rejected.

You then log in through the broker's own screen and authorize access there. Interactive Brokers scopes that authorization to a single account. Robinhood prompts you to open a separate agentic account during setup, which only works in a desktop browser. TradeStation requires you to request access first through HUB on the Platforms page.

Connector URLs: Interactive Brokers at api.ibkr.com/v1/api/mcp-public, Webull at api.webull.com/mcp, Public at mcp.public.com/mcp, and Robinhood at agent.robinhood.com/mcp/trading.

Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenClaw connect from the terminal instead. Adding Robinhood to Claude Code takes a single command, claude mcp add robinhood-trading --transport http https://agent.robinhood.com/mcp/trading, followed by /mcp to authenticate. Codex CLI uses its own add command with the same URL.

This route also reaches servers that run on your own machine rather than the broker's. Webull's local server launches through uvx and reads your app key and secret from a config file, so those credentials never leave your computer. Moomoo works similarly through its OpenD gateway.

There are two things to watch out for. Local setups usually mean handling API keys yourself, and a brokerage key should be treated like a password. And an always-on agent, whether that is OpenClaw on a messaging app or a scheduled job, keeps working while you sleep.

There are good reasons to want this. A hosted connector sends your positions to an AI provider's servers. You may prefer not to pay for a subscription or API tokens. Or you may simply want an open-weight model you control.

The protocol will not stop you, since MCP is model-agnostic and any client that speaks it can connect. The constraint is authentication. Brokers that authorize through a certified marketplace expect a client they recognize, so pointing a self-hosted model at one may not complete the login. For example, you may run into trouble trying to set up OpenClaw or Hermes to connect to Interactive Brokers' MCP server since those agentic tools are not in its whitelist of allowed clients.

The paths most likely to work are those using API keys rather than a browser sign-in, which means Webull's local server, moomoo's OpenD gateway, and Public's key-based option. TradeStation is the one that will not work at all, since it accepts only Claude and ChatGPT. Be realistic about the tradeoff, though. Smaller local models are less reliable at multi-step tool use than frontier models, and one that misreads an order schema is a real risk with real money.

Whichever route you take, do not let an agent trade in its first session. Webull can disable its trading tools entirely and run read-only, and its local server defaults to a sandbox rather than production. Moomoo defaults to paper trading and requires your trading password before it will place a live order.

When you do go live, set your limits first rather than after something goes wrong. Webull lets you cap order value and share quantity and restrict trading to a whitelist of symbols you choose. Robinhood and Public both provide simulation tools that show what an order would do before it is submitted.

Then check the boring things. Ask for your positions and balances, and confirm they match what your broker app shows. If an agent cannot read your account correctly, it has no business trading in it.

Here is an example workflow end to end using Claude and Interactive Brokers. I told Claude I expected USO at $140 within two weeks and asked it to pick an expiration, build a bull call spread, and draft the instruction to my IBKR account.

An example of a simple options strategy being created with natural language in Claude Chat using Opus 5. The model provides its full reasoning chain and then sends the trade draft to my Interactive Brokers account.

It pulled live data before writing anything. USO was at $127.66 with implied volatility near 59%. My $140 target meant a 9.7% move, about 0.8 standard deviations over two weeks, and that math checks out. It called the move real but not a given. That is the pushback I want from a tool about to draft an order. But a standard deviation converts straight into odds. At 0.8, USO had roughly a one in five chance of reaching $140, and Claude never made that conversion.

It then compared two expirations. The Aug 14 weekly and the Aug 21 monthly priced the 130/140 spread almost identically, at about $2.77 and $2.79. Claude picked Aug 21 for two reasons. The long leg carried roughly eight times the open interest, which is a sound liquidity argument. It also described the later expiration as buying "an extra week of time for the same cost." That second reason is where it went wrong.

In this case, a drafted trade instruction from my Claude agent is delivered to my IBKR Desktop under the "AI Instructions" tab. I can then either reject it or open it into an order ticket to adjust the parameters and manually enter the trade like any other.

The draft landed in IBKR under its own AI Instructions tab, kept separate from my working orders, labeled as connected to Claude and set to expire in seven days. Claude had set the limit at $2.80, slightly above both quoted debits, which means the figures it quoted were computed off a price it was not proposing to pay. IBKR asks you to review that limit before submitting and gives two choices, Reject or Review and Submit.

That last step is the argument for this architecture. The analysis happened in the LLM, but the final decision happened in my brokerage account. What that buys you is a chance to catch a bad order, not a guarantee that one gets caught.

Jessica Inskip is Director of Investor Research at StockBrokers.com, bringing 15 years of experience in brokerage and trading strategy. A former FINRA-licensed rep, she held Series 7, 63, 66, and 4 licenses. Jessica focuses on investor education and brokerage industry research, appears regularly on CNBC, Bloomberg, The Schwab Network, Fox Business, and Yahoo! Finance, and hosts the Market MakeHer podcast.

Blain Reinkensmeyer, co-founder of StockBrokers.com, has been investing and trading for over 25 years. After having placed over 2,000 trades in his late teens and early 20s, he became one of the first in digital media to review online brokerages. Today, Blain is widely respected as a leading expert on finance and investing, specifically the U.S. online brokerage industry. Blain has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company, among others. Blain created the original scoring rubrics for StockBrokers.com and oversees all testing and rating methodologies.

• We used our own brokerage accounts for testing.
• We collected thousands of data points across the brokers we review.
• We tested each online broker's website, desktop platforms, and mobile app, where applicable.
• We maintained strict editorial independence; brokers cannot pay for inclusion or a higher rating.

Our research team meticulously collected data on every feature of importance to a wide range of customer profiles, including beginners, casual investors, passive investors, and active traders. We carefully track variables like margin rates, trading costs, fees, and platform features and use them to help rate brokers across a range of categories measuring ease of use, range of investments, research, education, and more.

At StockBrokers.com, our reviewers use a variety of computing devices to evaluate platforms and tools. Our reviews and data collection were conducted using the following devices chosen to reflect the everyday hardware our readers are likely to be using rather than top-tier configurations: iPhone SE running the latest iOS version, MacBook Pro M1 with 8 GB RAM running the current MacOS, and a Dell Vostro 5402 laptop i5 with 8 GB RAM running Windows 11 Pro.

Each broker was evaluated and scored on over 200 different variables across seven key categories: Range of Investments, Platforms & Tools, Research, Mobile Trading, Education, Ease of Use, and Overall. Learn more about how we test.

We tested 14 online trading platforms for this guide:

• Ally Invest review
• Charles Schwab review
• eToro review
• E*TRADE review
• Fidelity Investments review
• Firstrade review
• Interactive Brokers review
• J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing review
• Merrill Edge review
• Public.com review
• Robinhood review
• tastytrade review
• TradeStation review
• Webull review