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 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.

Uri Gruenbaum Co-Founder & CEO of TipRanks

Q How can an individual become a contributor?

We currently track and rank over one hundred thousand experts, including Wall Street analysts, financial bloggers, corporate insiders, and hedge fund managers as well as close to six hundred thousand individual investors. We capture insider and hedge fund transactions through their reports to the SEC. We track analysts and bloggers online and also invite them to submit their reports directly to us, which many do. Any blogger or analyst can approach us if they think we have missed them. However, this is rare. We seem to capture most active experts.

We also rank individual investors. This is done through our Smart Portfolio service. We aren’t a broker; so, we enable investors to sync their portfolios with their bank or broker to see a full portfolio analysis as well as what the experts say about their holdings, and of course how they rank. Any individual investor who wants to see how they fare can open a Smart Portfolio on TipRanks for free.

Q Is there a specific type of brand who uses your service?

Brands that are forward-thinking and looking to enrich the digital experience of their clients choose TipRanks.

Q You have a number of very large brands as clients, is this relevant to the retail end user?

We know that brokers that incorporate TipRanks onto their platforms, report increased client engagement, as measured by time on tool, higher trading volumes, and improved retention. So, our partnerships are relevant to the end-users who leverage our tools to make data-driven investment decisions.

Q More brokerages are giving clients access to buy stocks, as LPs have given them the ability to do this. Would your brand be a good fit for this type of brokerages?

We pride ourselves on our ability to tailor make solutions for all our clients.

Q By using your service, does it not also act as a great service for the client, but also helps the marketing department have new content to present?

It’s always exciting to announce new partnerships and of course, our marketing department always likes a story to share. However, the bottom line for us is always how we can bring retail investors the tools and data they need to make smart investments.

Q From an individual user perspective, what value does your premium service offer me?

There are some features that we offer to everyone, as it’s important to us that anyone can check how an expert ranks based on their performance track record or see the analyst rating consensus and price target of a stock. However, Premium, our most popular subscription unlocks a huge amount of data. Going back to analyst forecasts, with Premium you can filter the data to only focus on the top-performing analysts’ ratings and price targets, as well as see a list of analysts who have most recently rated the stock, alongside their price targets, and performance track record, both overall and on a per-stock basis. Premium also unlocks more stock analysis such as which insiders have bought or sold stocks recently, which can be extremely powerful data, when it comes to informative trades, i.e. those that reflect sentiment.

For those looking for new investment ideas, we have a large choice of tools and screeners that are fully open to Premium users and are a huge help in identifying stocks with the most positive indicators.

Q How hard is it to integrate to your brand?

We have an extremely talented and hardworking team that works with our clients to tailor our tools to their your needs. iFrames literally take moments to integrate – they are a fast and pain-free way to merge our interactive tools, which we custom build to ensure they appear completely native. Naturally, we have a robust REST API solution which can handle many thousands of calls.

Q What’s the best way to reach you for more information?

The direct channel to our sales team is sales@tipranks.com. I invite your readers to follow us on LinkedIn as well as our other social media channels, where we can also be reached.