How AI tools are reshaping stock trading, investment research in China

For China’s 250 million individual investors, AI is helping them make money from one of the world’s most volatile stock markets

When Ryan Lei has an investment idea, he no longer has to spend days writing code and trawling through historical data to corroborate it.

The 27-year-old quantitative trader in Hong Kong now delegates much of the grunt work to artificial intelligence. For a recent bet tied to a major technology initial public offering, Lei deployed Futu’s AI agents to collect data on similar listings over the past decade and parse their post-debut performances. The AI-assisted research informed a short position that eventually earned him several thousand US dollars.

AI can rapidly complete workloads that used to take days or even weeks, according to Lei, who has nine years of investing experience and co-manages a seven-person proprietary quantitative trading team.

Lei’s case highlights the extent to which AI could change the behaviour of traders and even reshape the landscape of the financial and asset-management industries.

In the US, brokerages such as Robinhood and Webull are integrating AI into their tools to help clients, mostly individual investors, buy and sell stocks.

In Hong Kong, Futu Securities – one of the city’s largest online brokers – launched an agentic feature called “expert mode” in July, allowing clients to conduct investment research and place orders for stocks, options and exchange-traded funds using natural-language instructions.