Stock Sentiment Analysis Tool

Inspiration

I have always been very interested in the world's financial markets and how they operate. One thing I have learned over time is that being in early is key. However, constantly looking for the latest news on all your stocks is tiring, inefficient, and slow.

What it does

This application allows users to track the online sentiment of their favorite stocks using an intuitive GUI compatible with windows and mac. Once users select the stocks they want to keep an eye on, they see a live plot of their stocks online sentiment.

How we built it

Being a non-cs student majoring in finance, one of the most accessible languages to me is python. The program is based on a simple tkinter GUI that aggregates stock tickers and displays a matplotlib graphic of online stock sentiment. The stock tickers are used to scrape the right page of finviz.com. (Finwiz aggregates stock news from around the web) These headlines are then analyzed using the NLTK sentiment analysis toolkit. Once sentiment data for each stock is averaged it is passed on to the graph.

Challenges we ran into

As a new coder at my first hackathon, the challenges of this project were endless. This being the first project I have ever done that pulls together the different things I've learned in python over time. I specifically struggled with a lot of the data frameworks, trimming raw HTML and, using the grid method in Tkinter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first 'Big' program that I've ever made, I would have never believed that I would manage to create a program as complex as this in as little time as this; goes to show what 22 hours and coffee can do!

What we learned

I learned a lot from doing a project in as little time as this. Going into this project I knew nothing about Tkinter and GUI design in general. I learned how to use checkboxes, entry fields, buttons, and more in the Tkinter grid. I also greatly improved my web scraping skills, especially cleaning up raw HTML. additionally, I feel I got much better at reading python syntax and fixing bugs in my code. A majority of this was due to me now knowing how to better search the internet for the solutions I need

What's next for Stock Sentiment Analysis Tool

I am planning to add an 'Alarm' feature that sends users an email when a stock's sentiment changes past a certain threshold. Additionally, I'd like to add a feature where you can see the headlines with links in the GUI

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• matplotlib
• nltk
• pandas
• python
• tkinter