An AI app can hold two connectors at once. One reads the market. One holds the account. Robinhood runs its own trading MCP server for outside agents, and NoVo’s connector can sit beside it in the same app. The agent reads through NoVo and acts through the broker. Pairing a market-data MCP with your broker covers the setup. This article is about one habit to add once it is running.

The problem

An agent states numbers with the same confidence whether they are two seconds old or two hours old. In a conversation that is a small flaw. Next to a connector that can place an order, it matters more. A level that was correct this morning can be wrong by the afternoon, and the sentence the agent writes looks identical in both cases.

What NoVo sends with every reading

Every reading from NoVo’s tools carries three fields. as_of is the time the reading refers to. age_seconds is how old it is now. as_of_kind says how the time was established: measured, retrieved or unknown.

The kind matters. Measured means the time is the moment the market data itself was taken. Retrieved means it is the moment NoVo fetched it. Unknown means what it says. An agent that reports the kind is telling you how far to trust the timestamp.

A stopped feed does not return an empty result. It answers with an error and a retry time. So “nothing came back” is never a silent state. The agent has been told the feed is down, and it should tell you.

The instruction to give

Put a standing instruction in the agent’s setup, in your own words. Something like: before proposing any order, list each market reading you used, with its time, its age and its kind. If any reading is older than a limit I set, or its kind is unknown, stop and say so.

You choose the limit. A same-day options trader may want it tight. A weekend check on a perp can tolerate more. The point is that a limit exists and the agent has to clear it out loud.

Read first, act second, confirm in between

Keep the two connectors in separate steps. Step one, the agent reads through NoVo and reports what it found with ages. Step two, you look at it. Step three, if you choose, the agent acts through the broker connector.

NoVo’s tools only read. None can place an order or touch an account. That split is useful. Whatever the agent learned from NoVo, it cannot turn into a trade without going through a different connector that you control.

What a good report looks like

“SPY is above the gamma flip, reading taken forty seconds ago, measured. The S&P 500 perp reading is three minutes old, retrieved.” That is a report you can act on or reject.

“SPY is above the flip and the perp is up” is the same information with the part you need removed.

When the agent leaves it out

Ask again. If it still cannot give an age, treat the number as unknown. Is this market data stale and the difference between delayed and stale cover how to think about each case.

The NoVo MCP & API serves the three fields on every reading. Many tools are free and need no key. Paid tools need an API subscription.