By Andy Serwer

I came for the lobster and stayed for the covered calls.

If a crustacean and options trading mash-up has you vexed, understand that I'm talking about OpenClaw, the red-hot artificial-intelligence agent that some hearty souls are using to manage their investments these days. And yes, it was OpenClaw's lobster motif that first caught my eye.

Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT ( sooo 2025), OpenClaw can proactively execute your tasks, like make appointments or buy tickets to a show. It can also advise you on investment strategy and even trade securities while you're sitting on a beach.

What could possibly go wrong?

My point isn't that OpenClaw is the second coming. It's that AI is coming -- or rather is already here and increasingly used by Wall Street institutions and individuals alike. I'm not suggesting that you should join this clambake, but it might behoove you to understand what's going on.

OpenClaw, which was created last November by Austrian vibe coder Peter Steinberger (who now works for OpenAI), reportedly has 38 million monthly users (many in China) sloshing around its lobster-nomenclatured ecosystem. Discord's OpenClaw channel, Friends of the Crustacean, a popular place to access the agent, is a flurry of often deeply technical activity. (My handle is Andre the Seal.)

To get a bead on this, I spoke with Thomas Peterffy, chairman of Interactive Brokers Group, who has long been on the bleeding edge of financial technology. Peterffy, 81, also happens to be the wealthiest man on Wall Street, in no small part because Interactive Brokers shares have climbed from $16 to $72 since April 2022.

"I started this business as a computer programmer, so I've always been building algorithms," says Peterffy. "We've given algorithms to clients for many years, and they automatically execute orders. AI is just like a new, even higher level computer language. We are big users. Certainly, it's the future."

Interactive Brokers' customers use AI either through external agents like OpenClaw or through the brokerage's internal tools provided by partner company Reflexivity. "The problem was never a shortage of data. It was that it would take days to work through. Now it's like eight minutes," says Jan Szilagyi, CEO and co-founder of Reflexivity, a Harvard University Ph.D. in economics and finance who once helped manage global macro portfolios for Stan Druckenmiller.

On Wednesday morning, with the market roaring after the announcement of a two week cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran, I asked Szilagyi to help me set up a post-TACO trade (TACO, of course, stands for "Trump always chickens out"). The algo came back with an 11-page report concluding that "first day TACO trades worked TOO WELL," and suggested (with entry points) strong long positions in crude oil and the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX; a moderate long on the State Street Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund; a moderate short on the S&P 500 index; and a weak short on Treasuries.

Interactive scrutinizes customers using external tools like OpenClaw. "We have a program to catch orders they send and examine them within a fraction of a second to ensure they comply with regulations and applicable margins," says Petterfy.

What happens if OpenClaw sells my stocks against my wishes? "That's not my problem," he says. "That's your problem. We check the orders and execute."

That problem might be closer to home over at upstart stock-trading platform Public.com, which has gone whole hog (or is it whole shellfish) into AI. Public's customers can connect OpenClaw directly to their accounts to analyze and, yes, trade securities.

Privately held and venture-backed by Accel and Tiger Global, New York--based Public has billions in assets under management and millions of customers, according to Jannick Malling, Public's Danish-born co-founder and co-CEO. Public began exploring AI in 2023 to create "the world's first agentic brokerage," he says. OpenClaw's introduction is bringing that endeavor to a boil.

"Trading went from phone-based, to the web, to mobile apps, and now to agentic AI," says Malling. "That you can just type in 'Find me three different ways to make 10 grand this month selling covered calls across my portfolio' is a massive shift."

Setting up OpenClaw requires digital elbow grease. "It took me 1 1/2 to two hours to set up," says Dean Ahrens, a 19-year-old trader from Westminster, Colo., who's perhaps typical of the customers that Public is looking to net. Ahrens recently used OpenClaw to build and execute a put-option strategy on the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF and to help find and buy puts on Hims & Hers Health.

On the institutional side, Cliff Asness, who runs giant quant hedge fund AQR, was once cynical about AI. "I probably slowed us down by a couple of years on this," he says, "which is rational when you have something that's worked for 30 years. All these decisions involve dollars, time, and risk."

Asness, 59, who notes that analysts at his funds have been sifting through credit-card data and positive and negative words in earnings statements for decades, became a convert. "It turns out machine learning" -- a subset of AI -- "is better than our old methods," he says.

Historically, AQR's positions were built conceptually 50% on historical data and 50% on economic story, Asness says. Now, because of AI, it's more like two-thirds data, one-third story.

Have AQR's returns improved?

"Well, it's been a good five years," he says.

Asness is less sanguine about AI for retail investors. "I'm leery about a world where machine learning is on everyone's lips," he says. "This notion that you can pick just a few stocks with it may not be worse than any other method, but I don't see any magic there."

When it comes to OpenClaw, bon appétit. Just don't get pinched.

Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com. Follow him on X and subscribe to his At Barron's podcast.

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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April 10, 2026 02:00 ET (06:00 GMT)

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