What I Built
I've been investing since I was 18 and have spent years on platforms like TradingView, Finviz, and Yahoo Finance. At some point, a question started nagging at me: if I had direct access to the underlying data these platforms use—not just their interfaces—what could I do with it? So I built my own.
Ticker Fintel is a stock screener and portfolio tracker pulling real-time market data, insider transactions, and financial news—with an AI assistant that's context-aware of your portfolio and the financial data in the system. You can ask it questions about your holdings, market trends, or specific companies, and it responds with relevant, personalized insight rather than generic answers.
Building it let me get my hands on the raw data layer: price feeds, fundamentals, institutional filings. I wanted to see what was possible when you control the data yourself—how you filter it, combine it, and layer intelligence on top of it.
What I Learned
- •Data economics: Market data isn't free. Providers price by call volume, symbol coverage, and freshness. I learned exactly where costs accumulate and why pricing tiers exist.
- •Competitive dynamics: Most platforms pull from the same upstream sources. Differentiation isn't about better data—it's how you structure it, present it, and let users interact with it.
- •AI as a differentiator: Generic chatbots are everywhere. What makes AI useful in financial tools is grounding it in the user's actual data—turning raw information into actionable insight.
Where Does AI Add Real Value?
This project sits at the intersection of finance, data, and AI. It sharpened how I think about data-driven businesses and where intelligence layers can add real value.