FinBeacon

FinBeacon turns Slack into your personal market analyst—monitoring your portfolio, tracking real-time news, answering investment questions, and proactively surfaces evidence-backed recommendations.

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Inspiration

We recently entered the workforce ourselves, and one thing became obvious almost immediately: investing is easy to start, but incredibly difficult to stay consistent with.

Most people want to build wealth, but they also have careers, meetings, deadlines, and lives outside the stock market. Staying informed often means juggling brokerage apps, financial news websites, Reddit threads, research reports, and AI chatbots just to understand what's happening to your portfolio. Eventually, investing becomes another item on an already overwhelming to-do list.

We realized the problem wasn't that people didn't care about their investments—it was that life simply gets in the way. We wanted to build something that could stay on top of the market for them, surfacing only what truly matters.

That idea became FinBeacon—a proactive portfolio intelligence agent that lives in Slack. Instead of waiting for users to ask questions, FinBeacon continuously monitors your portfolio and watchlists, tracks financial news, understands your holdings, and surfaces meaningful insights before they're even requested.

What it does

FinBeacon transforms Slack into a personal portfolio intelligence hub.

Users can build and manage their investment portfolios directly within Slack through intuitive workflows. Once a portfolio is created, FinBeacon continuously monitors live market data and financial news, automatically delivering personalized daily digests, portfolio summaries, and evidence-backed recommendations.

Unlike traditional chatbots, FinBeacon doesn't wait for prompts. It proactively notifies users when important developments affect their investments, helping them stay informed without constantly watching the markets.

When users do have questions, they can chat naturally with FinBeacon:

  • "Should I buy XYZ stock?"
  • "Why is my portfolio down today?"
  • "Summarize today's market news."
  • "How healthy is my portfolio?"

FinBeacon combines live market data, financial news, portfolio context, and intelligent reasoning to provide grounded, conversational responses backed by supporting evidence.

How we built it

FinBeacon was built using the Slack Deno SDK as a fully agentic Slack application. Rather than simply responding to prompts, FinBeacon continuously observes a user's portfolio, reasons over changing market conditions, and provides insights accordingly. Users can also engage in natural conversations with FinBeacon, asking questions about their portfolio, individual stocks, or the broader market.

At its core is Claude Sonnet on AWS Bedrock, which acts as FinBeacon's reasoning engine. Instead of relying solely on an LLM's knowledge, the agent dynamically decides which tools it needs, retrieves live information, synthesizes evidence from multiple sources, and delivers grounded, conversational responses.

To ensure every recommendation is backed by real-world data, we integrated multiple external systems:

  • Alpha Vantage MCP provides live stock prices, company fundamentals, ticker resolution, and market sentiment, allowing the agent to reason using current market conditions rather than stale model knowledge.
  • Finnhub Marketplace APIs supply real-time market data and ticker information, complementing Alpha Vantage with additional financial intelligence.
  • Marketaux delivers real-time financial news, ensuring recommendations are based on the latest market developments.
  • RSS feeds from Yahoo Finance and CNBC add broader market coverage and breaking financial headlines.
  • Slack Real-Time Search API enables FinBeacon to retrieve relevant workspace context, making responses more aware of ongoing conversations and shared workspace knowledge.

Portfolio data is persisted in Supabase, while custom Slack workflows power portfolio management, market-aware Q&A, daily portfolio digests, and evidence-backed investment recommendations.

Architecturally, we designed FinBeacon as a true Slack agent rather than a collection of prompts. Slack workflows handle user interactions, the reasoning engine determines which tools to invoke, external services provide live market intelligence, and the agent synthesizes everything into actionable insights. By keeping Slack functions lightweight and separating business logic, reasoning, data access, and presentation into separate modules, we built a system that is modular, testable, and easy to extend.

Challenges we ran into

Since this was our first time building a Slack agent, there was a natural learning curve. Understanding the Slack Deno SDK, agent architecture, workflows, and platform capabilities required us to spend significant time exploring the documentation and experimenting with different approaches. Fortunately, Slack's documentation was comprehensive and well-structured, making it much easier to get up to speed.

Another challenge was working within the Slack developer sandbox. Configuring the environment and debugging agent behavior wasn't always straightforward, but the Slack Developer Community proved invaluable. Discussions in the Slack channels helped us work through issues quickly, and we were able to learn from both the community and the Slack team while building FinBeacon.

As we integrated multiple real-time financial data sources, we also had to ensure that responses remained grounded, reliable, and delivered quickly enough to provide a seamless conversational experience. Balancing multiple APIs while keeping interactions responsive required careful orchestration of our tools and workflows.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a truly proactive investment agent instead of another reactive chatbot. FinBeacon continuously monitors portfolios, watches the market in real time, and surfaces meaningful insights before users even think to ask.

  • Grounding every decision in live financial intelligence. By combining Alpha Vantage MCP, Finnhub Marketplace APIs, Marketaux, Yahoo Finance, CNBC RSS feeds, and the Slack Real-Time Search API, FinBeacon reasons over live stock prices, company fundamentals, market sentiment, and breaking financial news to deliver evidence-backed recommendations instead of relying on static LLM knowledge.

  • Leveraging MCP and Real-Time Search for dynamic financial reasoning. Rather than embedding financial knowledge into prompts, FinBeacon retrieves live stock prices, company fundamentals, market sentiment, and breaking news through the Alpha Vantage MCP server and the Slack Real-Time Search API, enabling the agent to reason over the latest information every time it answers a question or generates a recommendation.

  • Balancing privacy with market awareness. Every user's portfolio and watchlist remain completely private, but FinBeacon doesn't limit itself to only those stocks. It continuously monitors the broader market and proactively surfaces significant events, emerging opportunities, and breaking news that could be relevant—even for stocks a user hasn't added yet.

  • Building a modular architecture that's easy to extend. Separating Slack workflows, agent reasoning, portfolio management, and external data providers allowed us to integrate new financial intelligence sources without changing the core agent logic.

What we learned

This project reinforced that building an effective agent isn't just about connecting an LLM to a few APIs.

Creating a reliable agent requires thoughtful orchestration of tools, grounding every response in trustworthy data, handling failures gracefully, and designing workflows that feel natural to users. We also discovered how versatile Slack is as a development platform and how seamlessly workflows can be used to create intuitive, interactive user experiences.

Most importantly, we learned that the quality of an agent is determined by the quality of the information it can access and the decisions it makes with that information. Combining MCP, real-time search, and live financial data transformed FinBeacon from a simple conversational assistant into a reliable, context-aware investment companion.

What's next for FinBeacon

Our roadmap includes:

  • Expanding beyond U.S. markets to support international exchanges, enabling users to track global portfolios from a single Slack workspace.
  • Dedicated watchlists for stocks users are researching, allowing FinBeacon to proactively monitor potential investments before they're added to a portfolio.
  • Support for additional asset classes, including ETFs, cryptocurrencies, mutual funds, and index funds.
  • Smarter market intelligence, including SEC filing analysis, earnings monitoring, and proactive alerts for major corporate events that could impact a user's investments.
  • Publishing to the Slack Marketplace, making it easy for anyone to install FinBeacon in their workspace with a single click.

Our long-term goal is to make FinBeacon more than just a portfolio tracker—we want it to become a trusted financial companion that helps people stay informed, discover new opportunities, and make confident investment decisions without having to constantly watch the markets.

Built With

  • agentic
  • alpha-vantage
  • claude
  • denosdk
  • llm
  • mcp
  • model-context-protocol
  • real-time-search
  • rest
  • rts
  • slack
  • supabase
  • typescript
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