TipRanks URI GRUENBAUM Co-founder & CEO of TipRanks
Q Can you give us an outline of the history of TipRanks? Back in 2011, when working as a software engineer and investing as a hobby, I followed some bad advice from an analyst that was published on a leading website. Six months later, I’d lost half of my investment. I wanted to understand what went wrong. I researched this analyst whose advice I had followed, and after writing down every recommendation he had given online, and measuring how it performed, I realized he got it wrong most of the time. This experience drove me to find a way to use technology to create financial accountability. To be honest, I couldn’t believe it didn’t already exist, and so that was the starting point. When we launched TipRanks in 2012, we provided a service that enabled retail investors to see how analysts rank based on their performance, rather than on the prestige of the bank they work for. This was a completely new concept. The service quickly became the standard in Wall Street and is used by most banks. We leveraged our popularity and strong tech capabilities to launch more unique datasets and research tools. Our focus is on giving retail investors the same research power as the biggest asset managers through simplified tools and alternative data. Additionally, today, more than 50 global institutions, including TD Bank, Morgan Stanley, eToro, Nasdaq, Santander, CIBC, TMX, and others, integrate our products onto their platforms to enable their users to make educated data-driven investment decisions. Q Just to be explicitly clear, you are not offering financial advice or a signals service to anyone. Can you elaborate more on how you work? That’s right. TipRanks is a tech company, or more accurately a fintech one, as we operate in the finance field. We don’t offer financial advice; there are plenty of top-performing experts doing just that, and one of the features we offer is enabling investors to follow
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them. Rather, we make it easy for retail investors to conduct their own research using institutional-grade tools. We do this through financial big data. Our technology scans and analyzes all finance-related news, corporate filings, analyst research, and social media and transforms terabytes of data into simple, visual tools that investors can use in their stock analysis and research. To do this, we use natural language processing technology, machine learning, and AI. We’ve been honored to win a number of industry awards based on the strong capabilities of our technology. The result is a suite of simplified research and analysis tools. All our features are presented visually and are also interactive and intuitive to use. We regularly add new features, for example in the past few months, we added data about website visitors of companies whose online presence is essential, as well as an exciting feature that shows changes to companies’ risk factors as reported to the SEC. Retail investors of all levels use TipRanks tools. They are simple enough for the most inexperienced investor while being of immense value even to the most experienced investor. In fact, TipRanks powers Nasdaq’s Smart Portfolio offering. Q Your brand offers credibility by having contributors assessed on their correct recommendations. How do you do this? Our Financial Accountability Engine™ assesses financial experts based on three factors. The first is their average success rate, in other words, the percentage of an expert’s ratings/ transactions that result in a positive return, usually measured after one year, the second is their average return per stock rating/ transaction, again with a one-year default, and the third is the statistical significance of the ratings/ transactions, as the more activity, the more significant the results. Although our default is to measure experts over one year, you can also use TipRanks to see how they perform over different time frames and sectors.
