Stock Sentiment Analyzer

Inspiration

Since before starting this hackathon, we had the idea of working with Machine Learning. We were also inspired by the Reddit GameStop stock incident in 2021, which demonstrated the power of online communities in influencing market behavior.

What it does

The user can choose between viewing news or Reddit comments and then select their preferred stock. The platform displays real-time prices and public sentiment, it also has a news section, where the app retrieves latest news and categorizes their sentiment, to help users make better-informed investment decisions.

How we built it

The project was developed in Python using an extensive number of libraries, including praw, a Reddit API, streamlit to create the website, vaderSentiment to analyze and categorize the text and yfinance to retrieve news and information about stocks. These tools were used for data handling, API integration, and creating the visual interface of the web application.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several challenges throughout development. One major issue involved the APIs we planned to use—the Twitter API, for instance, was far too expensive to implement. Another significant challenge came when we realized our project needed to be a web application instead of a desktop one, which required us to adapt our approach and learn new libraries we were initially unfamiliar with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a fully functional application that successfully integrate multiple APIs and libraries, many of which were new to us. Despite our limited experience, we worked collaboratively, conducted extensive research, and learned through trial and error to bring our idea to life.

What we learned

We learned how to work with complex libraries such as yfinance, streamlit and APIs that gather the latest Reddit posts. Additionally, we improved our collaboration skills by learning how to use Git and GitHub effectively for version control and teamwork.

What's next for Stock Sentiment Analyzer

In the future, we aim to expand Stock Sentiment Analyzer beyond Reddit to include other platforms such as X (formerly Twitter). As the project evolves, we believe it could become capable of predicting stock trends more accurately—helping users make smarter investment decisions without relying solely on financial advisors.