I Built a Small Agentic Trading App. It Cost Me a Few Hours and About $0.20 Per Run.

I’ve been writing code for many years now. Not as much these days, but I started when I was eight. With BASIC. After this many years, you develop a particular mindset. It helps sometimes and causes problems other times. When you see a problem, you immediately think about writing a solution. But you should first investigate what’s already out there. So when I see articles and hear people talking about AI agents and orchestration frameworks and multi-agent architectures and all that, my first instinct is: if you know code, you just need a few lines, a couple of API calls, and an LLM. That’s it. That’s your agent. I wanted to test that instinct. So I mixed it with something I actually care about: trading. What I Built The idea was simple. I wanted an app that: Gets some input from me (optionally) Calls a few APIs to gather market data and news Sends everything to an LLM with the right context Saves the output for future runs (a basic form of memory) Sends me the result via email and push