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Company Insight Utility

Built by Peter Dulworth for Nesh

A webapp built in flask and react that lets users view financial information about companies. all information is obtained via web scrapers.

Submission Video

Explanation video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOjehyxotzU&feature=youtu.be

Demo

Search

search gif

Analysis

analysis gif

Features

  • stock overview
    • includes last stock price, net change in price in past day and percent change in price over past day
  • company description
    • includes a brief description of the company (pulled from their SEC filing)
  • financial numbers
    • includes important financial numbers such PE, Market Cap, etc.
  • news articles
    • includes recently published news articles relating to the company
  • analysis of earnings call transcripts
    • list of companies earnings calls including links transcripts and analysis
    • analysis includes:
      • call participants
      • tone analysis: e.g. the overall done of the call (happy, sad, analytical, etc...)
      • participation analysis: how many questions did each participant ask and answer

Installation

1. Clone the repo

Clone the repo or download the zip.

2. Install frontend dependencies

cd frontend
npm install

3. Install backend dependencies

it is recommended that you use a virtual environment but not required. To setup a virtual environment run (from the project root):

python3 -m venv env

This will create a new virtal environment in the folder 'env'. To activate the virtual environment run:

source env/bin/activate

If you want to deactivate the environment later simply run deactivate.

Next, install all dependencies by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Note: I developed this application for Google Chrome. Most testing has been done with Chrome 72.0.3626.109.

Note: This application uses python 3.7.

Running the app

First start the backend, then start the front end:

1. Back End

python3 backend/server.py

The API will now be live at http://localhost:5000

You can test that the backend is up by going to http://localhost:5000. It should display a simple webpage with some information about the endpoints.

2. Front End

In a second terminal window:

cd frontend
npm start

The website will now be live at: http://localhost:3000/

Important Note

If at anytime data fails to load, it is likely because your IP has been blocked by seeking alpha's web scraping watch dog. To accomodate this I created an endpoint on the backend that will generate a proxy and route all requests through it. To do this simply open a new tab and navigate to http://localhost:5000/generate/proxy. Each time you visit this URL it will generate a new proxy. You can visit this URL as many times as you would like and it will generate a new proxy each time. If a proxy isn't working well it often helps to just generate another one.

System Architecture

  • front end
    • react app: dynamically creates pages based on JSON response from requests to backend endpoints
  • backend
    • python flask
    • webscraper using beautifulsoup4 to traverse the DOM

Ideas for future updates

  • handle mobile better
  • better error handling for scraper / tested on more sites
  • analysis of articles instead of just earnings calls
  • some kind of data caching

Challenges

  • parsing the earnings call transcripts is difficult because there is very little CSS to work with. you mostly have to rely on the text.
  • seeking alpha is blocks your IP after a couple requests, so I had to spend a lot of time writing a script to rotate proxies and user agents (this comes at the cost of slowing down requests).
  • seeking alpha loads a lot of content via javascript which makes it very difficult to scrape.

Sources

  • nasdaq.com
  • seekingalpha.com