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-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, cofounder and CTO of TipRanks, told The Jerusalem Post Sunday. Finovate, which runs four international conferences a year, previously awarded TipRanks “Best in Show” in its Spring showcase.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.”Analysts skew toward advising people to buy 86.5 percent of the time, he said, and just over half the time, on average, their advice is 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 cofounded 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 years, and people see this as a disruptive technology,” Gat said. “We bring a level of transparency to it.”Other winners this fall included Mitek Systems for their photo bill pay system, which allows users to pay bills using their cellphone cameras; Interactions, which creates realistic-sounding automated customer-care services; and Motif Investing, which groups stocks based on a specific theme or trend.