SafeInvest

👥 Group

Rameen Khan, Bushrat Zahan, Sevara Omonova

💡 Inspiration

We were inspired by how difficult and intimidating investing can be for first-generation investors and beginners who don’t have access to financial mentors. With limited guidance, small budgets, and a flood of misinformation online, many people end up falling for hype, scam tickers, or extremely risky stocks without fully understanding what they’re getting into.

We wanted to build a tool that doesn’t tell users what to buy, but instead helps them think critically before they invest by clearly showing risk, legitimacy, and red-flag signals in a beginner-friendly way.

📖 What It Does

SafeInvest is a beginner-friendly investment safety dashboard. Users enter a stock ticker and optionally a budget, and SafeInvest instantly returns:

A clear risk level (Low → EXTREME)
Why the stock is risky in plain English
Red flags and green flags for credibility
A legitimacy / scam check
A 7-day price view
Recent news and sources for verification

The goal is to help users avoid scams, hype, and high-risk traps before putting their money in.

🔨 How We Built It

We built SafeInvest using Flask (Python) for the backend and a simple HTML/CSS frontend for the dashboard UI.

The app pulls real market data using the Finnhub API and fetches 7-day price history from Alpha Vantage. It also gathers recent news using Google News RSS feeds for transparency and verification.

We implemented a rule-based risk engine to flag scam-style signals such as penny stocks, very new IPOs, missing company profiles, small market caps, and non-major exchanges.

To make the results beginner-friendly, we integrated an LLM via OpenRouter to generate structured explanations, risk summaries, and warnings in plain English.

We also added multi-language support using deep-translator so both UI labels and AI output can be translated for accessibility.

🧱 Challenges We Ran Into

Building SafeInvest under tight time constraints came with a few key challenges:

Optimizing performance while translating both UI labels and AI output in real time
Ensuring translations worked correctly and consistently across all supported languages
Verifying and cleaning news data pulled from external RSS feeds
Handling delays and inconsistencies from real APIs (market data + news)
Making everything feel fast, smooth, and reliable for users

🏆 Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

Building a complete investment safety dashboard from scratch
Combining real market data + rules + AI explanations
Adding scam-style red-flag detection
Supporting multi-language UI and analysis output
Creating a clean, beginner-friendly interface

🎓 What We Learned

External APIs are unpredictable and require strong fallback logic
Translation adds real complexity to performance and UX
AI must be paired with rule-based safety checks
Turning technical risk into plain English is harder than expected

🔮 What’s Next for SafeInvest

Support for crypto and alternative assets
Stronger language auto-detection
More fundamentals-based checks (revenue, filings, employees)
PDF risk reports users can save or share
Watchlists and stock comparisons
Deeper scam-pattern detection

🏆 Why SafeInvest?

Beyond competing for the main prizes, we built SafeInvest with the intention of creating real impact for underrepresented and first-generation investors who are often excluded from traditional financial guidance.

SafeInvest is designed to be more than just a stock analysis tool — it is a safety-first, accessibility-focused platform that helps vulnerable users avoid scams, misinformation, and high-risk investment traps before they put their money in.

Our project stands out because it combines real market data, rule-based scam detection, and AI-powered explanations into one clean, beginner-friendly experience, while also supporting multiple languages for broader accessibility.

💫 Best Minority Hack

SafeInvest directly addresses a problem that disproportionately affects minorities and first-generation investors: lack of access to financial mentors and exposure to predatory or misleading investment schemes.

Many people from underrepresented communities enter investing with small budgets, limited guidance, and high exposure to social-media hype and scam tickers. SafeInvest acts as a protective checkpoint by clearly flagging risky patterns, scam-style signals, and legitimacy concerns in plain language.

By prioritizing clarity, accessibility, and safety over speculation, SafeInvest empowers users to make more informed decisions and protects limited capital — which is especially critical for communities where financial losses have a greater long-term impact.

💫 Best Use of Gemini API

SafeInvest uses the Gemini API (via OpenRouter) to generate structured, beginner-friendly risk explanations based on real market data and computed red-flag signals. It was accessed via OpenRouter using OpenRouter-managed API credentials. As a result, there is no associated Google AI Studio project number

Instead of using AI to make predictions or give financial advice, we intentionally constrained Gemini to:

explain why an asset is risky
summarize legitimacy concerns
surface scam-style warning signs
provide cautious, budget-aware guidance

Gemini receives real inputs such as market cap, IPO age, exchange listing, price, and detected risk flags, and is required to return a structured JSON response with a risk level, reasons, red/green flags, and a scam check paragraph.

This safety-first, constrained-AI design shows how Gemini can be used responsibly to support vulnerable users, turning complex financial data into clear, accessible insights rather than hype or speculation.