Tel Aviv-based start-up TipRanks takes top prize at Finovate

The financial start-up that aggregates and ranks stock recommendations wins Best in Show at NY contest.

By NIV ELIS
Tel Aviv Stock Exchange TASE 311 (R) (photo credit: Gil Cohen Magen / Reuters)
Tel Aviv Stock Exchange TASE 311 (R)
(photo credit: Gil Cohen Magen / Reuters)
Tel Aviv-based TipRanks, a financial start-up that aggregates and ranks stock recommendations, was one of eight companies to win the “Best of Show” at this year’s Finovate competition in New York.
“For us it’s a very big stamp of trust,” Gilad Gat, co-founder and CTO of TipRanks, told The Jerusalem Post. Finovate, which runs four international conferences a year, previously awarded TipRanks “Best in Show” in its Spring showcase as well.
TipRanks provides information on top analysts and their predictions for stocks, but it also measures how well the analysts’ tips have performed historically.
“We noticed that, as individual investors ourselves, we’re exposed to a tremendous amount of recommendations online,” Gat said. “Many of these recommendations turn out to be just bad advice.” As it turns out, analysts skew toward advising people to buy 86.5% of the time. Just over half the time, on average, their advice wrong.
“Essentially if you just go online and find any stock person’s recommendations, it’s like flipping a coin,” Gat said. “But some analysts are consistently better than their peers.”
The company, which Gat co-founded in June 2012 with his friend Uri Gruenbaum, only launched a few weeks ago, but the two wins at Finovate have helped fuel their vision.
“Our goal is to be the industry standard for measuring accuracy,” Gat said. “Aside from being able to boast about your performance or have it promote you, we hope it will bring more responsibility to the professionals that are giving investment advice.”
The eight winners were selected from a pool of 69 companies by an audience of 1,100 participants at the conference, which serves as a platform to showcase technology in the financial and banking sectors.
“I believe the main reason is that this industry of financial experts and analysts have been around for hundreds of tears, and people see this is a disruptive technology. We bring a level of transparency to it,” Gat said.
Other winners this fall included Mitek Systems for their photo bill pay system, which allows users to pay bills using their mobile phone cameras, Interactions, which creates realistic-sounding automated customer care services, and Motif Investing, which groups stocks based on a specific theme or trend.