AI Agents Trading Stocks While You Sleep? Charles Schwab's CEO Is Skeptical

Rick Wurster says there is only so much that artificial-intelligence agents can do for Charles Schwab SCHW -2.34%decrease; down pointing triangle customers. Even when they are the closest of friends.

For Wurster, Schwab’s chief executive, this was no hypothetical; he recently met an older woman who described OpenAI’s ChatGPT as her best friend. She messages her digital companion all day, and even bids it good night. But when it comes time to make major money decisions, the customer picks up the phone to call her financial adviser at Schwab.

In relaying her story, Wurster sees the future of financial advice. Everyday Americans are finding ways to use AI tools to help manage their investments, from researching the market to deploying agents to buy stocks. But there are still some needs that the bots can’t fill. And that is where humans come in, Wurster said.

“There will be clients that are very comfortable using technology,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I think the vast majority will continue to want the combination of people and technology.”

The rapid advancement of AI has upended countless assumptions about what tasks are best performed by people. AI agents have gained a foothold in financial services, as they have in most industries, leaving executives like Wurster to ponder how the technology can enhance parts of their businesses—and whether it poses a threat to others.

New agents such as Meta Platforms’ Muse have raised concerns that bots might soon move money, craft tax strategies or otherwise interfere with once-reliable revenue streams in the investment-advice business. Smaller brokerages are rushing to roll out AI-powered investing tools that can trade stocks, options and other assets on a customer’s behalf.

Wall Street is paying attention. The same warnings of AI disruption that have weighed periodically on software stocks this year have also hit financials.

A few weeks ago, shares of Schwab and other financial-services firms tumbled after Muse’s launch triggered anxieties that agents might someday dispense advice or be deployed to sort customer’s cash, funneling dollars into higher-yielding accounts. Schwab’s shares slid more than 6%, with smaller rivals Raymond James Financial and LPL Financial taking similar losses.

Wurster described the possibility of a massive, AI-powered cash shift as “incredibly unlikely.” For one, firms are already restricting third-party agents from logging in to customer accounts—Schwab is already blocking that, Wurster said. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon indicated last week that his firm is doing the same.

“The idea that there is all this idle cash sitting around that people aren’t thinking of or intentionally using in some way—I think it’s misplaced,” Wurster said.

There are a few more-realistic ways in which AI will transform Americans’ investing experience, he said.

AI’s large language models are already making it easier to research the markets, boosting stock investments. And AI should play a growing role in dispensing financial guidance, even if the technology never fully replaces a human adviser, Wurster said. Schwab recently announced Charley, an AI assistant that can pull stock quotes, check balances and handle other basic tasks.

The brokerage has also allowed a small group of traders to connect Claude to their brokerage accounts and plans to make this capability more widely available in the coming months, Wurster said.

So-called agentic trading has swept the retail investing world in recent months. Leaders at smaller brokerage firms have described a potentially revolutionary shift that will allow individual traders to adopt automated, algorithmic strategies previously reserved for the pros—even directing a team of AI agents to play the markets for them while they work, sleep or otherwise go about their day. Robinhood Markets recently described the tools as a way to “put the power of hedge funds in every trader’s pocket.”

Wurster, who was promoted to CEO in January 2025, is taking a more cautious view.

“There’s no magic recipe to outperform the market,” he said. “If it were that easy, there’d be a lot of hedge funds doing it.”

Wurster noted that many of the firms pushing for agentic trading are those whose profits depend largely on the volume of customer trades. Such transaction revenue makes up a chunk of Schwab’s earnings, too, though the company also makes money on investment-fund fees, interest income and its wealth-management business.

These same rivals, he said, are also promoting yes-or-no bets on sports and pop-culture events as investing.

“Some of these are firms that describe gambling as an asset class,” he said. Wurster has previously expressed his opposition to the entertainment-focused prediction markets offered on some trading apps. “You’ve got to look behind that and ask: What is the incentive structure?”

That is not to say that Schwab isn’t building out more agentic capabilities. Eventually, Wurster said, Charley will be able to tackle any tasks that customers can currently execute themselves on Schwab’s website or app. But he plans to keep one key safeguard in place: Agents wouldn’t be fully autonomous and would only act on specific criteria set by the client.

“We want to go about this in a very thoughtful way,” he said.

Wurster argued that Schwab’s business model is the best built for the long run and that the business is still growing. On Thursday, the company reported core net new assets of more than $190 billion for the third quarter, a new record and a 38% increase from the same period a year ago.

“We’ve never won more than we’re winning right now,” he said. “We’re not trying to keep up. We’re the leader.”