Trading with Claude (and writing your own MCP server)

Summary

Trading with Claude (and writing your own MCP server)May 4, 2025 • 12 minute readEver wanted to check on your portfolio and trade some stocks directly with Claude? Well you’re in luck.Claude and MCPIn November 2024, Anthropic open-sourced MCP (Model-Context Protocol) to standardize the way AI assistants interact with other tools. This standardization allows AI assistants to seamlessly integrate with various tools and platforms, enhancing their capabilities and usability. Since then, it’s been growing in popularity and adoption, slowly becoming a key component in the development of AI-powered tools and applications.While the original version had some support for remote MCP servers, it was somewhat complicated to implement and did not see widespread adoption. So, as a natural evolution to the original MCP, they released the 2025-03-26 version with support for OAuth 2.1 authorization and replaced the HTTP+SSE transport with “Streamable HTTP” transport.Perhaps most importantly, all of this only worked in Claude Desktop - till now. A few days ago, they added “Integrations” to Claude, allowing everyone to use MCP tools directly from the web chat interface.Unfortunately, they labeled it as beta and only made it available on their more expensive Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, launching with a limited number of partners.So for now, we will stick to exploring the possibilities of MCP with Claude Desktop.What is an MCP server anyway?An MCP server is just a server, which can be hosted remotely or a local binary (or a local command) that exposes a list of functions, resources and other information to an LLM.It exposes this via a standardized mechanism (see above), and then LLMs such as Claude can choose when to call it and ask to use a tool (much like a function call).SnapTradeWhich brings me to my next point: I work at SnapTrade (and a mandatory disclaimer: I’m writing this in a personal capacity, not as an employee of SnapTrade) - which allows anyone with some technical know...