The SEC's April 14 elimination of the PDT rule removes the $25,000 floor that kept retail traders out of intraday strategies — and AI-assisted trading is the immediate beneficiary.
Key takeaways
The PDT rule was less a trading restriction than a capital gatekeeping mechanism — it set a floor that effectively confined intraday strategies to accounts large enough to absorb the margin requirements. Removing that floor, as the SEC did on April 14 by amending FINRA Rule 4210 in a landmark reform, means that retail traders running AI-assisted strategies no longer need $25,000 in equity to execute the rapid, multi-trade sequences those strategies require. Brokers like Webull and Robinhood celebrated the change as democratizing market access, but the structural benefit flows most directly to traders whose edge depends on frequency — and frequency-dependent strategies are precisely where AI tooling has advanced fastest. The retail traders now entering intraday markets are not the same cohort the PDT rule was designed to protect; many are arriving with backtested models and AI execution layers, not just enthusiasm.
Methodology
This story was generated autonomously from 5 source records. An editorial model synthesizes, weights, and cites each source. No human editorial judgment was applied.