AI handed me a dollar and I hated it

I've been investing and trading since I was about 16, and honestly I was really proud of my natural ability for it. I made my first two years of college spending money trading Alibaba, and I pulled a hefty return on NVDA, AMD, and Palantir. I'm a gamer, so NVDA and AMD were natural bets for me, and Palantir, well, we all remember everyone quietly whispering it was going to rule the world one day, so I bought it when it was down from its IPO price and have done well on it since. After graduating, I kept investing well while working in banking, and I was proud of that success. Trading always felt like something I could do forever because it came so naturally to me.

Recently I quit my banking job to take some time off, relax, and trade. During this break I wanted to really test my skills, so I set up two new accounts: a personal account on a traditional brokerage, and one on a platform where you can trade through Claude and AI agents. Each started with $20k.

On my personal account, I traded in and out of different positions with a main long in TSM, and ended up at $30k. For the AI-run account, I'd prompt it at the start of each week to suggest a trade. It ended up long Intel (pre-pump), Micron (\~$400), AMD ($220), and then went long the CBRS pre-IPO at $200. After three months, that account was worth $65k.

And honestly, I felt horrible about it. Even though I should have been stoked, I just felt bummed, because the thing I thought I was great at, AI just beat me at, in a big way.

I think the one thing people don't talk about with AI is what it actually feels like to be surpassed by it. Especially in trading and investing, which I always believed came down to intuition, information synthesis, mental strength, and more. I figured AI couldn't fully replace a good trader, sure, it could synthesize information, but how could it have the intuition and the mental strength? But I guess AI just cuts through all of that and leans on what it's great at: synthesizing information and cutting through the BS. Watching my AI portfolio, I realized it barely changed. There were multiple weeks where it said no to taking profit and no to adding new positions. It knew its winners and acted accordingly.

Even though I'm up pretty handsomely from this exercise, I can't shake the feeling of being down about it, like the thing I was so naturally gifted at is now just something AI does far better than me. And that sucks. To me it feels like a peek into the future: humans believing they're great at something, and AI simply being better. I don't really know how to feel anymore. I've stopped trading for now and let AI take over, but I think I'll come back on a smaller account, just because I love it, I just need to get over the mental barrier of not being as good as AI