Artificial intelligence is reshaping how ordinary people invest, and social trading platforms are dealing with the question of whether or not AI will replace the human “copy trading” model th
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how ordinary people invest, and social trading platforms are dealing with the question of whether or not AI will replace the human “copy trading” model that made them popular. Head of eToro US, Andrew McCormick, recently joined TheStreet Roundtable to say no, AI will not replace copy trading. It will make it better.
eToro, founded in 2007, pioneered copy trading with its CopyTrader tool in 2010, letting users automatically mirror top investors.
"Social is our DNA,” McCormick said.
McCormick frames AI as a "co-pilot," an enhancement that makes both everyday investors and the star traders they copy sharper, rather than a replacement for either.
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McCormick pointed to the adoption of electronic trading in the late 20th century as an example of how new technologies tend to integrate with larger capital markets.
"I worked at E-Trade many years ago and at the time people thought electronic trading is going to get rid of financial advisors. Financial advisors are still managing trillions and trillions of dollars," he said.
In his view, the people being copied will use AI to become better traders. Most people would rather follow a successful investor or trader, rather than spending time building their own models and systems.
"Maybe Jane Doe has a YOLO portfolio that's more driven by agentic trading and people can follow that as well, the two worlds coexist and they make people better," McCormick explained.
The biggest opportunity agentic trading brings is leveling the information playing field.
"The biggest impact of AI is this massive asymmetry of knowledge between Wall Street and mainstream," McCormick said. "We have jobs, we have kids, we don't have time to read prospectuses, financial statements, but the fact that AI can do that closes that information gap."
The everyday investor simply lacks the time to do Wall Street's homework. Even full time traders cannot compete with hedge funds and other financial institutions which employ hundreds of researchers.
AI also suits a market that increasingly never sleeps.
"If we're looking at 24-7 around the clock markets, which is happening. We’ve got to sleep sometime. You can have some agentic tools so when you're sleeping, if there's a huge opportunity that comes up, it can take it for you."
Round-the-clock trading is arriving fast, with Nasdaqplanning near 24-hour trading in late 2026, the NYSE's Arca extending hours, and a new 24X exchange already live.
Agentic trading offers some powerful bulwarks against emotional decisions in the markets.
"Human emotion is powerful, but emotion can get us in trouble sometimes," McCormick said.
Everyone who has played around in the stock or crypto markets has made an emotional decision that they later regret, including McCormick.
“Every single investment regret I ever had was because I got too excited or too nervous. Many years ago, I sold some Bitcoin, and I regret it to this day."
AI acts as an emotional circuit breaker, since human input is not actually required to make any traders. AI does not have emotions, giving it a major advantage when competing against human actors. McCormick cautioned that we should not give all the power to agents.
"I don't think humans should turn it all over to AI agents," he said.
AI is genuinely useful for digesting filings and checking impulsive decisions, but "agentic" tools that trade while you sleep add new risks, and copying a star trader, human or AI, carries the same downside it always did.
