How to Build a Stock Market AI Trading Bot (step-by-step)

TL;DR: How to set up, build, and deploy your very first stock market AI trading bot (from scratch).

The full three-tier system you can use right now to start automating your stock trades - and it's way easier than you think.

I've been investing and trading for 7 years. For the last 3, I've been trying to automate my own trading properly.

It's only now, with the latest frontier models, that this is actually possible. A few months ago, the MCP connections and the execution technology simply didn't exist.

This is your complete masterclass on automating your trading with Claude x Interactive Brokers (IBKR).

Contents

• The System Explained
• Tier One: Read-Only Portfolio Analysis
• Tier Two: Enabling Execution
• Tier Three: Mobile Support

By the way, I spent hours building a spec that you can drop directly into Claude to build your first AI trading bot for you.

It's included in my new free Skool community. I'll attach it below for those of you interested.

👉 https://www.skool.com/milesdeutscherfinance

With that said, let's get right into things:

The System Explained

Before building anything, I want to give you the full roadmap for what we're building.

Here's an entire visual map of what we'll be building:

• Connection (MCP/API)
• Data (desktop folders)
• Intelligence (your AI of choice)
• Execution layer (your AI of choice)
• Full automation (use your AI to run your bot on a schedule)

The crux of this system is getting your AI to interact directly with your brokerage.

There are three ways to do this:

Tier one: Read-only integrations

Essentially, your broker's own AI product can read your account and provide some insights into your trading data, but you still need to manually execute.

Tier two: Direct execution

Where your AI can directly execute within your brokerage on your behalf

Tier three: Mobile

The entire process moves off your desk completely. A separate always-on device runs the connection, and you interface with your trading bot through your phone.

"But Miles, why bother building this? I can manage my portfolio myself"

Two real reasons:

First is friction. Friction kills good decisions. You can know exactly what you should do (add to a position, DCA, TP, etc.) and still not do it, because the physical act of sitting down and executing is its own barrier.

If you've ever procrastinated on a trade, this trading bot setup will be useful for you.

Second is portfolio efficiency. With this build, you're essentially creating an always-on connection between your portfolio and Claude.

This means you can not only use this bot for actual trade execution but also for research, general portfolio management, queries, and so on.

Tier One: Read-Only Portfolio Analysis

This is the safest place to start, and if you've never set up an AI trading bot before, you should spend a bit of time here before moving to Tier Two and Three.

Setting up the connection

In this guide, I'll be using Interactive Brokers as it's the exchange I personally use, but if you use another broker, the steps will be similar here (as long as your broker has an MCP).

If you ever get lost, you can just ask your AI to guide you through the process for your specific brokerage.

I like to connect my broker directly through Claude Code, but you can use other AI providers like Codex too.

For Interactive Brokers, follow these steps:

1. Open your IBKR account
2. Under "Trade," open "AI instructions"
3. Connect to Claude

What Claude can see

Once connected, Claude has read access to your positions, cash, margin, P&L, full transaction history, and risk exposure.

Essentially, Claude can read all your account info, but it can't execute anything (Tier Two).

A couple of sample prompts:

1"What's my account value, and how much dry powder do I have left?"
2
3"Summarise all trades from the last month - total commissions paid, win rate, and average size."

Pro tip: If you want to make this setup even more powerful, you should connect the FMP and QuiverQuant MCP connections.

These connections allow Claude to tap into live market data 24/7, so you can pair them with the portfolio connection we just set up.

Tier Two: Enabling Execution

If you're just starting out, my honest recommendation is to stick with Tier One. You can build dashboards, conduct portfolio analysis, AI journaling, etc. with just a read-only connection.

For those of you who are a bit more experienced and who want actual trade execution, this section is for you.

The TWS API

For live execution, we'll run through the Trader Workstation API.

To get set up, you'll need two things:

1. Python (you won't be writing any of it yourself, just installing it)
2. Trader Workstation Desktop - this is essentially IBKR's algo-trading tool, but we can connect it to Claude to build a basic trading bot.

Configuring Trader Workstation

Download TWS and log in.

Once you're logged in, configure these settings:

• Turn off read-only (if you want execution)
• Restrict connections to your own device only
• Decide whether you want it to stop asking for confirmation on every order
• Set it to restart itself once a day

Start with paper trading

I highly recommend starting with a paper trading account to test your strategy and ensure everything is running smoothly before loading funds.

Connecting Claude to TWS

Once TWS is configured, prompt Claude:

1"I have Trader Workstation running and logged into my paper trading account, with API access enabled and read-only turned off. Here's the socket port: [your port number]. Check whether Python is installed and install it if it isn't. Set up an environment and connect to Trader Workstation. Before doing anything else, confirm the connection by pulling my account summary and open positions, and tell me which account number you're connected to."

With this connected, Claude can now actually place orders on your behalf.

Tier Three: Mobile Support

This is the part I personally use the most. It's so helpful (and fun) to prompt my stock bot on the go.

For mobile support of your bot, I recommend Telegram.

Why Telegram?

For me personally, Telegram has one real advantage: it's always running, and I already use it daily. Having my trading system live in an app I already use is extremely low-friction.

A couple of things you need for this to work:

• A separate always-on device (old laptop or dedicated Mac Mini work well)
• Telegram downloaded, updated, and proper account security (2FA, strong password)
• Claude Desktop/mobile

The connection essentially works like this:

Telegram → Listener Script → Claude Code + TWS. Essentially, Claude is "listening" for your messages on Telegram and just forwards the action items to TWS.

We'll be using BotFather for this process.

• Search "BotFather" on Telegram
• Create a new bot
• Connect the token from BotFather to Claude Code

Now, whenever you send a message to your bot on Telegram, Claude is connected and can forward the action items to TWS.

The cool thing about this is that you can use TG support for much more than just trade execution.

You can text your bot for trade alerts, setups, research, etc.

And if you spend some time connecting additional MCPs, Claude will have access to even more market data that you can conveniently prompt directly from Telegram on mobile.

Wrapping Up

I hope you've found this article helpful.

If you did, be sure to follow me here @milesdeutscher. Every single day I post about how you can actually use AI to gain an edge in financial markets.

For deeper AI insights, follow me over on @aiedge_.

Reminder: I put together an entire spec based on this article that you can paste into Claude/Codex to get started building your first AI trading bot.

Posted for free in my Skool community.

👉 https://www.skool.com/milesdeutscherfinance