Cyber pets, blind dates, and stock trading in China's OpenClaw craze

For weeks China has been swept up in a so-called "lobster" craze as users rush to install OpenClaw, even lining up outside Tencent and Baidu headquarters or paying strangers to set it up. The phrase "raising the lobster" went viral as people experimented with agents that promise to handle tasks from managing schedules to building assistants or running small side businesses.

Some of the most high-risk experiments involve finance. Several users have deployed OpenClaw to monitor markets and run trading strategies; one who goes by NPointer said she created a "stock-specific lobster," a multi-agent system for investment research, demo trading, and backtesting.

Others let the agent execute trades and reported mistakes—overselling shares, miscalculating orders, and losses that one user, Celia, said exceeded 30,000 yuan for a single person. Security concerns have followed the buzz.

China

openclaw, lobster, ai agents, multi-agent, stock trading, trading mistakes, backtesting, investment research, tencent, baidu