## 🌍 Background

Unlike the traditional profit-orientated approach in financial investing, responsible investing is a relatively new concept that expressly recognizes the importance of environmental, social, and governance aspects to the investor and the long-term health and stability of the market (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, 2021). However, currently, ESG does not have a standardized evaluation system that allows investors to quickly determine the potential of the financial products.

## ❣️ Inspiration

More recently, some have claimed that ESG standards, in addition to their social value, might protect investors from the crises that arise when businesses that operate in a hazardous or immoral manner are finally held responsible for their effects. Examples include the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster by BP and the billion-dollar emissions scandal at Volkswagen, which both had a negative impact on the stock values of their respective corporations. (Investopedia, 2022). Therefore, the demand of creating an easy-to-use ESG evolution tool for everybody is essential to address the stigma that investing, saving, and budgeting are only for privileged populations.

## ⚙️ Solution

Inspired by the current uncertainty about ESG evaluation methods, our team proposed and implemented an online ESG evaluation platform with our recently developed algorithms called Stock Stalker that allow investors to search, manage, and see the overall ESG performance of the selected stocks associated with a built-in recommendation system.

To See. To Learn. To Apply. To Earn. To Contribute. Stock Stalker redefines what it means to earn profits while ensuring the investment is making positive impacts on the environment, society, and governance. Using React, REST API, and our developed algorithms, Stock Stalker offers investors both access to real-time financial data including the ESG rating of the stocks, and a platform that illustrates the ESG properties of the store without providing those hard-to-understand technical details. After using our product, the investor can have a deeper understanding of ESG investments without the need to learn about professional finance knowledge. As a result, these investors are now able to make accurate ESG investments based on their interests.

## 🗝️ Key Product Features

·Allow users to search and save the selected stocks based on the input of stock symbols.
·Access to real-time financial data such as the Earning Per Share (EPS) and the current stock price trend.
·Provide numerical ESG ratings in different aspects with our developed algorithms.
·Illustrate ESG properties of the stocks through an easy-to-understand recommendations system.

## ⚙️ Tech Stack

·The prototype was designed with Figma while the front end was built on React
·We used Tailwind CSS, framer-motion and various libraries to decorate our web page
·The backend data was stored on JSON-Server, cors and axios
·Notifications are sent out using Twilio
·Functionalities were built with tradingviewwidget

## 🔥 What we're proud of

Even though we faced difficulties in the back-end implementation, we still figured out the techniques that are required for our site via collaboration. Another accomplishment is that our team members not only learned the programming techniques but also, we learned so much finance knowledge during the hack. Additionally, given that we were primarily a front-end team with no experience in dealing with the back-end, we are incredibly proud that we were able to take up the new concepts in very little time (big thanks to the mentors as well!).

## 🔭 What's Next for Stock Stalker

Looking to the future for Stock Stalker, we intend on implementing functions that connect our ESG evaluation site to the actual stock-buying organizations. Further implementation includes an additional page that provides the estimated price of the stock selected from the site with the buying options from different stock buying platforms so that the investors can compare and purchase the stock in a more convenient way.

## 🌐 Best Domain Name from Domain.com

As a part of our project, we registered stockstalkertech using Domain.com! You can also access it [here](https://www.stockstalker.tech/).
## Inspiration

In today's fast-paced world, the average person often finds it challenging to keep up with the constant flow of news and financial updates. With demanding schedules and numerous responsibilities, many individuals simply don't have the time to sift through countless news articles and financial reports to stay informed about stock market trends. Despite this, they still desire a way to quickly grasp which stocks are performing well and make informed investment decisions.

Moreover, the sheer volume of news articles, financial analyses and market updates is overwhelming. For most people finding the time to read through and interpret this information is not feasible. Recognizing this challenge, there is a growing need for solutions that distill complex financial information into actionable insights. Our solution addresses this need by leveraging advanced technology to provide streamlined financial insights. Through web scraping, sentiment analysis, and intelligent data processing we can condense vast amounts of news data into key metrics and trends to deliver a clear picture of which stocks are performing well.

Traditional financial systems often exclude marginalized communities due to barriers such as lack of information. We envision a solution that bridges this gap by integrating advanced technologies with a deep commitment to inclusivity.

## What it does

This website automatically scrapes news articles from the domain of the user's choosing to gather the latests updates and reports on various companies. It scans the collected articles to identify mentions of the top 100 companies. This allows users to focus on high-profile stocks that are relevant to major market indices. Each article or sentence mentioning a company is analyzed for sentiment using advanced sentiment analysis tools. This determines whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral. Based on the sentiment scores, the platform generates recommendations for potential stock actions such as buying, selling, or holding.

## How we built it

Our platform was developed using a combination of robust technologies and tools. Express served as the backbone of our backend server. Next.js was used to enable server-side rendering and routing. We used React to build the dynamic frontend. Our scraping was done with beautiful-soup. For our sentiment analysis we used TensorFlow, Pandas and NumPy.

## Challenges we ran into

The original dataset we intended to use for training our model was too small to provide meaningful results so we had to pivot and search for a more substantial alternative. However, the different formats of available datasets made this adjustment more complex. Also, designing a user interface that was aesthetically pleasing proved to be challenging and we worked diligently to refine the design, balancing usability with visual appeal.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have successfully developed and deployed a project that leverages web scrapping and sentiment analysis to provide real-time, actionable insights into stock performances. Our solution simplifies complex financial data, making it accessible to users with varying levels of expertise. We are proud to offer a solution that delivers real-time insights and empowers users to stay informed and make confident investment decisions.

We are also proud to have designed an intuitive and user-friendly interface that caters to busy individuals. It was our team's first time training a model and performing sentiment analysis and we are satisfied with the result. As a team of 3, we are pleased to have developed our project in just 32 hours.

## What we learned

We learned how to effectively integrate various technologies and acquired skills in applying machine learning techniques, specifically sentiment analysis. We also honed our ability to develop and deploy a functional platform quickly.

## What's next for MoneyMoves

As we continue to enhance our financial tech platform, we're focusing on several key improvements. First, we plan to introduce an account system that will allow users to create personal accounts, view their past searches, and cache frequently visited websites. Second, we aim to integrate our platform with a stock trading API to enable users to buy stocks directly through the interface. This integration will facilitate real-time stock transactions and allow users to act on insights and make transactions in one unified platform. Finally, we plan to incorporate educational components into our platform which could include interactive tutorials, and accessible resources.
## Inspiration

During these covid times, people have pondered over two major facets: "Finance" and "Environment". So we thought out a way how people today can "Finance the Environment". We wanted to motivate people to invest in promoting sustainable developement.

## What it does

We have built a web application that will allow new investors to explore various stocks that promote sustainable development and help the environment. User can save their preferences as we have connected their "InvestGreen" to google accounts. Apart from exploring various stocks, users can also write blogs and share their ideas and experiences of going green. We also have chat support, which we handled now, but soon we wish to shift it to the financial advisors' talk point. Basically, we have created a platform to promote sustainable development.

## How we built it

We have used ReactJS for the frontend. Google Auth (Firebase) for the authentication of users and Alphadvantage API to get all the data for the companies' stock market, Ascend for a chat support feature and various plug-ins to convert data to highly visual graphs for better designs.

## Challenges we ran into

We come from a non-CS background and some of us are new to react.js. Most of us were flutter developers. But we wanted to try react.js. We started building the whole website on react and have learnt something from the workshop that was conducted yesterday also. It was difficult to get the appropriate content of the website. It was difficult to integrate the chat support and the dashboard to reply to it.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very happy that we learnt a new tech stack like react.js so soon. We learnt how to build chat support on the webpage. We had to design the web page ourselves which we are very proud of.

## What we learned

We have learnt the importance of teamwork. We had split the work among each other and it had made things faster. We really enjoyed building stuff overnight.

## What's next for InvestGreen

We will deploy our website in the days to come. We are thinking to introduce an option that would help people to directly invest in the companies from this website itself instead of only showing the data.