I Attended A Retail Investor Summit, And The Day-trader Crowd Is Mega-bullish On Agentic Ai

• I recently attended the Silvia Investor Summit in New York City.
• Many of the events attendees were focused on opportunities in AI and crypto.
• The retail traders I chatted with made are hyped to see agentic AI reshape finance.

There was no AI doomsday scenario on the radar at this week's investor event I attended in New York City.

On October 7 and 8, over 1,000 self-directed traders gathered for Silvia Investor Summit, hosted by Anthony Pompliano, the CEO of ProCap Financial. On tap were speakers including GameStop CEO and retail trader hero Ryan Cohen, Opendoor bull Eric Jackson, and other figures closely followed by the retail crowd.

It was a diverse mix of markets junkies, crypto enthusiasts (one attendee wore a Satoshi Nakamoto football jersey), and day traders. When I asked the spectators what they were most excited for in markets, though, the responses were surprisingly unified.

Most attendees I chatted with quickly made it clear there's one game changer they're most focused on right now: agentic AI.

"AI agents will create more time for investors to do other things," one veteran trader told me on the sidelines of the event. "That's the most important thing there is. When everything is automated, everyone will have more time to do what they love. I'm 1,000% positive that it will be the force we need."

John Samuelson, the chief investment office of family office advisory firm Karas Partners, told me he's spent years helping clients understand digital assets. The bitcoin pin on his lapel hinted that he might be focused mostly on the crypto market's recent turnaround, but I was wrong.

Samuelson also brought up agentic AI for finance as the thing he's most interested in, as he sees it as bridging the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance, or DeFi.

"I see it as a very good thing across the board," he said. "It's a good thing for crypto and the digital-asset world because they now actually have a very extreme use case for the cryptocurrencies in the payment system area. It's a very good thing for the AI world because [AI agents] now have an ability to be able to complete transactions with each other."

David Arquilla, a content producer who has also been investing and trading for years, told me he's been focused on agentic finance recently because he sees it has a major breakthrough for many sectors, but particularly for bank stocks.

"I'm interested in industries that go down but are ripe for AI integration,"Arquilla stated. "How will they continue to use AI to become more efficient, more profitable? We've had a pretty big pullback in banks recently but in the future, I could see bank stocks being traded in a much higher multiple, given the integration of AI."

Arquilla added that he sees a world quickly approaching in which AI does most, if not all the actual trading for investors. Some investors have rejected the idea of allowing AI to complete trade for them using their own money but Arquilla said he thinks he would trust the technology, though he likely wouldn't give it all his capital at first.