AI Trading: How Investors Help You Beat the Market Vibe Coding Bot

Matt C. has had his share of hardships when it comes to his career in the market. The 37-year-old has been trading currencies and cryptocurrencies for over a decade, racking up some “big” losses along the way.

But he thinks he’s stumbled upon what could be a new trading hack: having an AI trade for you.

Many of his friends in the market have already jumped on this trend and automated their trading. He is currently in talks with the AI ​​platform about using the technology to create a semi-automated trading system, which he hopes will help him make money on the side while dealing with the stress of a newborn, he told Business Insider.

“If one domino falls, everyone else will think, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ just like I did,” he said.

More day traders are implementing AI-powered tools to gain an edge and avoid common (and costly) human errors in trading, such as panic selling, overtrading, and revenge trading.

As a result, investors are turning to AI to vibe-code their own stock screeners, trading agents, research assistants, and other automated tools to gain an edge.

Many of the traders who spoke to Business Insider say that AI helps improve overall performance, and that the tool has the potential to do something previously thought impossible: turn bad traders into good ones.

According to a 2025 study conducted by eToro, the number of investors who used AI in some way to choose their investments jumped 75% last year. 38% of investors say AI is more likely to make better investment decisions than they can, and 46% say technology is the future of investing.

René Balke, 32, a content creator who sells AI trading bots to investors, estimates that the number of investors signing up to use his AI tools through his YouTube channel has increased by about 50% in the last year.

Brendan Lee, a former banker who runs an education group for traders to vibecode their own AI tools, agrees, and interest in his group has soared. He estimates that inbound clients have surged more than 500% in the past year, largely due to the vibecoding craze.

“With Claude, almost anything is possible.”

Lee says he used to be more of a gambler than a trader.

He started dabbling in the market when cryptocurrencies started to become popular while he was in college. At the time, many of his trades were speculative and fueled by emotion.

At the time, he found several online guides that showed investors how to automate their trading. In 2024, as AI chatbots and agents become mainstream, he vibe-coded trading agents on the AI ​​platform Cursor and saw a noticeable improvement in portfolio performance.

Lee didn’t discuss his lifetime trading metrics, but he said an AI agent vibe-coded with Claude helped him generate an 87% return last month, easily outperforming the S&P 500, according to a screenshot of one brokerage account he showed Business Insider.

Lee currently sells courses and mentors other traders looking to vibecode their own bots. His group has about 380 “core members,” many of whom stay monthly to hone their AI tools and find support in the community.

There are several ways a trader can approach vibecoding a trading tool from scratch, Lee said, but the process typically begins by asking an LLM to create a coding project and provide prompts for setting up the structure of a trading system. This includes giving the AI ​​a trading strategy, telling it which trading signals to pay attention to, how to open a position and when to sell, and giving it access to real-time market data.

Bots can be as simple or complex as traders prefer, Lee said. No special equipment is required other than a computer and a subscription to Claude or ChatGPT.

“Whether you want to focus on the fundamentals, try building algos, or want a fully automated system, you can do just about anything with Claude,” he said, referring to the AI ​​models he uses most often.

“It helps control fear and greed.”

There are some caveats to AI. First, AI tools cannot help traders who don’t understand the basics of the market, Lee said, adding that he avoids working with beginners for that reason.

Second, AI cannot give traders a winning strategy, he said, adding that the tool may be most useful for people who simply have trouble sticking to a trading plan or want to try out a few strategies.

For many people, that benefit alone is game-changing. According to a 2025 study by Quantified Strategies, more than 35% of traders said their biggest challenge when trading was managing emotions and dealing with losses.

Lee pointed out that one of his pitfalls when trading is becoming impatient and selling a position at a loss.

“I’m not making emotional calls at 2 a.m.,” he said. “I think the most important thing is to be consistent and take emotion out of the process.”

Dr. Reid Deitzman, a 79-year-old psychologist and software programmer, sees similar value in AI. He started “experimenting” with ChatGPT last April, and after inputting a screenshot of the S&P 500 and having LLM enter a few parameters, he created a system to help traders find good market opportunities. He calls it Merlin.

Although Merlin is constantly being improved, Deitzman said it took several weeks to get the system up and running at first. Now he can provide Marlin with general information about the market, such as the level of the S&P 500 that day. The program provides him with about a page of pre-market buy and sell signals, a minute of price predictions, and a simple explanation of why a particular signal is flashing.

The program wasn’t difficult to build, but the bot requires investors to be familiar with the world of markets to be fully functional, said Deitzman, who has been trading for 50 years.

Alongside his work as a psychologist, Deitzman coaches traders and is well aware of the emotional mistakes investors can make in the markets. Traders usually knock on his door in moments of despair, and often after making large losses in the market.

Often, their problems stem from an inability to process emotions when trading, he said, pointing to issues such as revenge trading (in which traders try to make up for losses by taking increasingly aggressive trades), over-trading, under-trading and other errors.

He said the program was effective because it “helps control fear and greed.” “Having a buffer between you and the screen will probably give you a sense of security.”

Deitzman said his performance improved as he used Marlin more. One of the demo brokerage accounts he used, Marlin, posted a 788% return last month, according to screenshots and written performance records seen by Business Insider.

Daitzman added that the more you use Merlin, the more you will intuitively understand its principles and be able to spot the same buy and sell signals yourself.

“A lot of times I don’t even use it because I learned from it,” he said.

Balke, which sells automated trading systems, has had similar success with its AI tools. He first started trading 12 years ago. Balke, who has a background in programming, said after two years of mostly losing money, he decided to manually code an automated trading system to help him execute trades and stick to his strategy.

Since then, Balke has vibecoded several more bots with Claude and now runs several fully automated brokerage accounts. That is, he no longer executes transactions himself. One of his accounts is up 106% this year, according to performance records he showed Business Insider.

Balke said some of that success is due to the rise in major indexes in recent years, but a lot of it is because he’s been able to follow his own strategy without letting his emotions dictate his strategy.

“Since using the trading bot, it has been much more stable,” he said. “I just execute the strategy perfectly without any emotion.”

Balke speculated that the most ambitious traders are likely to turn to AI tools in the coming years, simply because the benefits cannot be ignored.

In Lee’s opinion, AI systems have essentially bridged the gap between retail traders and financial institutions.

“There’s a lot of things you can build to learn from your mistakes or have AI basically analyze it. So it could 100% turn a bad trader into a good trader,” Lee said.

Deitzman, who has been trading since the 1970s, said it’s too early to tell whether AI will be the future of retail trading, but there are many possibilities.

“If you asked me what the world would be like in 1975, I had a new calculator that I had just bought for $250,” he said. “Can you imagine what this technology will be like in 50 years?”

Do you have a story to share about vibe coding or market trading? Email this reporter at: jsor@businessinsider.com.