JPMorgan Says Its AI Investors Beat Traditional Portfolios in Tests

JPMorgan Chase & Co. tested artificial intelligence (AI) agents that allocate capital between stocks in response to changing market conditions, and it found that all eight agents beat both the traditional 60/40 portfolio and the bank’s own rules-based market regime model, Bloomberg reported Friday (July 10).

The bank’s strategists led by Thomas Salopek shared the results in a Thursday (July 9) note, cautioning that the results are based on historical simulations and should not be seen as proof that AI can consistently outperform markets, according to the report.

This is JPMorgan’s first attempt to build an AI agent that can identify market regimes, the report said.

“We are enthusiastic about the possibilities of agentic AI, even as we are wary to hand off asset allocation decision-making to an agent,” the strategists wrote, per the report.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race” found that financial services and insurance firms are going all in on AI, scaling the technology across more tasks than many other enterprise sectors.

The tasks in which the financial services sector has embedded AI include revenue recognition, credit scoring and sales forecasting, according to the report.

“These are environments where outcomes can be verified, defended to regulators and traced back through clean data pipelines,” the report said. “AI thrives here precisely because the rules are known. These are also, notably, tasks oriented toward protecting what a firm already has: its books, credit exposure and revenue pipeline.”

Coinbase announced in June that the users of its exchange can now connect their AI agent to their account so the agent can trade, pay and execute workflows on their behalf. The new Coinbase for Agents facilitates these connections and enables agents to get full context about the user’s financial life and act on the user’s behalf.

Robinhood announced in May that its customers can now turn some of their activity over to AI agents. This capability resulted from the company’s launch of its Agentic Trading and the Agentic Credit Card, which allows AI agents to make trades and credit card purchases on a customer’s behalf.