Professional Quants Agree. Vibe-Trading Is Coming.
9 min read·
Oct 28th, 2025
Integrating artificial intelligence makes good traders better.
Don't just blindly take my word for it. Take it from one of the world’s most successful hedge funds.
D.E. Shaw.
Press enter or click to view image in full size A Generative AI Software Developer opening at D.E. ShawIn July 2025, I interviewed for a generative AI position at this company. The role would have been a dream come true — building out the generative AI infrastructure to enhance the productivity of a quantitative trading firm.
And then taking home over $400,000 to boot…
If the worlds most profitable hedge funds are integrating with AI, retail will catch on sooner or later. But even now, there are fully agentic AI tools that you can leverage to outcompete the average investor and make you as productive as a staff engineer with Claude Code.
In fact, you can effectively “vibe-create” a profitable automated trading strategy in less than 3 minutes. Here’s how you can do it before everyone catches on.
And why you might not want to.
What is Vibe Trading?
Just like how Andrej Karpathy coined the term vibe coding to describe a style of software development where you essentially prompt an AI to write the code for you, I am coining a new term that will finally catch on in 2027.
Vibe trading.
Vibe trading is NOT the idea that you’re buying stocks based on whatever shit-posts you see on Wall Street Bets, or whatever hypeman shill spits out on YouTube.
Vibe trading is a process where you essentially prompt an AI to create profitable trading strategies. AI models act like junior quantitative analysts, and completely automate the work of ideation, financial research, testing, and deployment.
This can be done with a single prompt, which is both incredibly powerful and dangerous. Here’s how.
Cursor Creates Apps in One Prompt. NexusTrade Creates Trading Strategies
Just like how you can create a fully functional application with a single prompt with modern agentic coding tools, you can do the same thing with trading strategies.
To do this:
- Create a free account on NexusTrade
- Navigate to the AI Trading Agent
- Vibe your way to a profitable trading strategy
Press enter or click to view image in full size Using Aurora to vibe-trade – it can create a profitable trading strategy with a single promptYou can be as specific as you want. You can tell it to deep dive into the top 100 stocks by market cap and focus on those with increasing margins. Or you can say something vague, like “create a profitable trading strategy”.
The AI will do the work of autonomously performing research, creating trading ideas, testing those ideas, and optimizing the parameters. It’ll actively shape the strategies according to the user’s preferences. And, if a user wants the AI to “let loose”, they can turn on fully automated mode, allowing the AI to create dozens of profitable strategies within minutes.
For a trader that knows how to sit down and perform research, a tool like this is a godsend. Their productivity will increase 10-fold, as they test out their 100 different trading ideas within minutes with instant feedback.
And for a novice looking to just “try it out”, they can be productive too. Like how a vibe-coder doesn’t need to understand how the JWT works to authenticate a user, a vibe-trader doesn’t have to understand why their strategy that buys AI stocks with increasing margins outperforms the broader market.
This is both a blessing and a curse. Just like with their coding counterparts, vibe-trading can get you in some serious trouble.
Why vibe-trading can be so dangerous (and how to use it responsibly)
The dangers of vibe-coding
Let’s start with a familiar topic – vibe-coding.
A vibe-coder with Claude Code can build a fortress in a weekend. And that fortress can be toppled with a single stone.
The same thing applies to vibe-trading.
Let’s use a single concrete analogy. With vibe-coding, a user can create a basic app with:
- User authentication
- Payments processing with Stripe
- CRUD operations
For all intents and purposes, the app will work in the happy path. They can deploy it using AWS and serve it to real users. A couple of tutorials later, and they have a custom domain and auto-scaling.
So what’s the problem?
This only works in the happy path.
As soon as a malicious user figures out that you didn’t set a strong enough JWT secret or that you hardcoded it instead of setting an environment variable, the entire app is done. The safety of all users that created an account is compromised and in the hands of malicious hackers.
It might not seem like a big deal, but when your entire Stripe account is drained by tens of thousands of dollars, then you’ll really start to care.
The same dangers exist with vibe-trading.
How the dangers of vibe-coding extend to vibe-trading
A person that vibe trades won't have a deep understanding of their trading strategies.
This can be very dangerous, especially with real money on the line.
While Aurora autonomously does the work of creating profitable trading strategies with a single prompt, a user who doesn't know how to trade, doesn't truly understand how to evaluate these strategies.
Thus, they don’t know how incredibly risky it is to deploy.
For example, one of the most profitable strategies I’ve created with Aurora is one that rebalances between UPRO and GLD.
Press enter or click to view image in full size This UPRO-GLD Optimize Portfolio is up 39% from May 10th 2025 to Oct 28th 2025 with a percent change of 39.8%, Sharpe ratio of 2.79, Sortino ratio of 4.76, and max drawdown of 5.3%. In comparison, SPY is up 21% in the same period. The full performance metrics are available hereFor the past decade, this strategy has significantly outperformed the broader market in backtests. With the rise of the S&P500 and Gold, this strategy has seen returns that has left the S&P500 in the dust, and even outperformed in bearish periods like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thus, I’ve deployed it live and shared it with everybody, and the strategy has earned over 40% in the past 6 months.
Not backtest performance — real-world, auditable results (click here to see for yourself).
So what’s the problem?
There are few.
Vibe-Traders cannot truly comprehend risks
A vibe-trader doesn’t truly understand the risks of the strategies they deploy. For example, even though the UPRO-GLD strategy has performed phenomenally, results like these are atypical, particularly for newer investors.
More than that, vibe-traders don’t understand concepts like leverage. An inexperienced trader that thinks this is a money printing machine will be sorely mistaken during economic downturn.
It is possible, and even probable for GLD and UPRO to fall drastically during a real recession. Just like how a vibe-coder won’t know how to respond to a DDoS attack, a vibe-trader won’t know how to manage their portfolio’s risk, which can cause extreme financial ruin.
This isn’t a theoretical risk; it has happened before.
When the first “reasoning model” was released, I used it to “one-shot” create a trading strategy. In the backtests, it performed very well.
One year later, and it is quite literally the worst publicly-deployed trading strategy on the NexusTrade platform.
The strategy used leverage to buy the all-time high and sold the stocks when it reached an all-time low, locking in catastrophic ruin. While the broader market is up 18%, this strategy is down the same amount, with a max drawdown of 58%.
Press enter or click to view image in full size The GPT o1-mini strategy is down 18.7%. The maximum drawdown is 58% and the Sharpe/Sortino ratio is negative. See the full results hereEven if the strategy had held, it would’ve performed much better. The risk of not understanding a trading strategy cannot be understated.
So how do we mitigate it?
Tips on How to Vibe Trade Effectively
Just because vibe-trading is risky doesn’t mean it won’t explode in popularity. Millions of apps are vibe-coded everyday with Cursor despite the risk. How do we manage it?
By knowing what we’re doing.
Step 1: Learn the basics of trading
Just because you can create a profitable strategy with a single prompt doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn the fundamentals. There are free, interactive tutorials that teach you the fundamentals of how to trade.
This includes:
- Learning about technical and fundamental indicators
- Learning how to place an order
- Learning about trading strategy optimization
Once you understand this, you’ll know what the AI is doing when it creates your strategies, and be able to steer it in the right direction.
Step 2: Understand each step of the process
Just like how it is highly discouraged to turn automatic mode when implementing authentication, you shouldn’t turn on automatic mode when creating your strategy.
You should read and understand each step of the process.
Don’t know what market cap means or what “CAGR” represents? Open a new tab and ask the AI. Can’t define the difference between Sharpe and Sortino? Look it up.
The agent isn’t just good for creating trading strategies – it also helps break down financial concepts and makes it accessible.
Step 3: Deploy proven strategies and paper-trade ideas
Finally, one of the best ways to keep yourself safe with vibe-trading is to deploy proven trading strategies.
Strategies like Buy and Hold SPY and DCA into VOO are proven to outperform the vast majority of hedge funds in the long-term. Why fix what’s not broken?
By connecting a brokerage like TradeStation, you can execute these trades automatically.
If you do want to vibe-trade, start with paper-trading. See how it performs in real-life, and study the strategies’ pros and cons. Once the strategy has enough real-world experience, you can shift it to live-mode with a small amount of your portfolio with the click of a button.
Press enter or click to view image in full size You can deploy trading strategies with the click of a buttonConcluding Thoughts
As someone who has worked on AI-Powered trading for the past 5 years, it is obvious where we are heading.
“Vibe-trading” is set to be the default way that retail investors deploy trading strategies. If the world’s most successful quants are hiring AI Engineers, that says something about the impact of AI and algorithmic trading.
But, it carries significant risk that cannot be understated.
Just like with vibe-coding, traders should understand what their strategies are doing. They should know how to test them, and how to know if the performance will hold up over time.
NexusTrade offers an all-in-one comprehensive vibe-trading platform. Not only can you create trading strategies with a single prompt, but you can also explore comprehensive tutorials to understand why the strategy works.
All for free.
Successful traders are already using it and seeing massive returns. Those who choose to upgrade are earning 5 years of NexusTrade Premium in 6 months. This is not an exaggeration — it’s a direct quote.
Press enter or click to view image in full size A review of the platform from the NexusTrade DiscordIn the past two weeks alone, over 600 AI Agents have been deployed. Are you going to join in late when it’s already all over Reddit and TikTok?
Or are you going to get started right now, and have your portfolio thank you?
