The Ticker Room

How it works
Lobby
Ticker
Discover
Ask

Inspiration

The Ticker Room was inspired by the several finance tools that exist across the internet, as a way to group the most important notifications and alerts from our favorite stocks.

What it does

You name the companies you want to follow. Twice each weekday it goes and reads about each one, news, Reddit and X, analyst price targets, SEC filings, and writes a short briefing. Every figure in it keeps the sentence it was pulled from, with a link and a confidence level. In between those runs there's a standing watch that reports things as they happen. The lobby sorts by whatever needs looking at today. There's also an Ask page for questions, and Discover, which suggests companies you haven't added.

How we built it

Python and FastAPI on Cloud Run, server-rendered HTML, no frontend framework. Gemini writes the briefings and runs the tool loop behind Ask. Parallel does the actual research: Search for news and social, Task for targets and filings extracted against a schema, Monitor for the standing watch, FindAll for discovery, Extract to repair citation previews that came back as cookie banners, Responses for a second opinion off the live web. Firestore for history, Grafana for metrics and alerts, and the API keys come from AWS SSM at runtime so they never touch the repo.

Challenges we ran into

Pricing of the API 😅

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mostly that you can check it. Every number has a ? that gives you back the sentence and where it was published.

What we learned

A broken state that looks like a working one is worse than an error. Almost nothing here crashed. The real bugs were an empty list, a stale price, a thread that got filtered out, all of which render the same as good news.