💡 Inspiration

The spark came from a simple frustration: why do stocks move?

We watched friends lose money on "meme stocks" without understanding why prices crashed. We saw parents hesitate to invest because financial news felt like a foreign language. We realized that while hedge funds have armies of analysts explaining every market movement, everyday investors are left guessing.

The gap was clear: Financial intelligence is gatekept. Analyst reports are paywalled. Even "free" financial news is drowning in jargon.

We asked ourselves: What if AI could democratize this? What if anyone could click a stock chart and instantly understand why it moved—in plain English, backed by real data, completely free?

That question became our mission at Hack the Valley X.

🎯 What It Does

Sherlock and Stock is a Chrome extension that turns confusing stock charts into clear explanations.

Here's how it works:

Navigate to any stock on Google (e.g., AAPL, TSLA, NVDA)
Click our extension icon
Select a date range on the stock price graph that you want to analyze
Get an AI-powered breakdown of what moved the stock

Within seconds, you receive:

📊 Price movement analysis that visualizes the change for you
📰 Key events that drove the change (earnings, news, market context)
🎓 Educational insights explaining investing concepts using AI
📚 Cited sources so you can verify and learn more
💡 Plain-language explanations anyone can understand

No finance degree required. No paywalls. No jargon.

🛠️ How We Built It

Our tech stack bridges frontend simplicity with backend intelligence:

Platform: Chrome Extension with side panel UI, background service worker, and content script

Uses chrome.sidePanel, chrome.action, chrome.storage, chrome.tabs, chrome.scripting

Frontend framework: React

Backend framework: Node.js

Languages: TypeScript, Python, JavaScript

Build tooling: Webpack 5 + Babel

Plugins: html-webpack-plugin, dotenv-webpack

Loaders: babel-loader, css-loader, postcss-loader, style-loader

Styling: Tailwind CSS 3 + PostCSS + Autoprefixer

With custom lightweight UI components in src/components/ui (button, card, badge)

Icon set: lucide-react

APIs/AI services:

Perplexity API (https://api.perplexity.ai/chat/completions) for stock analysis
Google Gemini API (generativelanguage.googleapis.com) for chat Q&A
Alpha Vantage API (NEWS_SENTIMENT) for sentiment data

Runtime env/config:

Environment variables via dotenv-webpack (e.g., PERPLEXITY_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY)
No server; all logic runs in the extension context using fetch
Output/bundle: Built assets to dist/ with sidebar.html and sidebar.js (single entry src/sidebar/index.tsx)

Key Technical Features

1. Chrome Extension Integration

Feature: The project integrates with Chrome's APIs (chrome.tabs, chrome.storage) to interact with the browser environment.

2. AI-Powered Stock Analysis

Feature: The project uses AI to generate stock analysis based on input (e.g., ticker symbol, date range).

3. Sentiment Analysis

Feature: Sentiment analysis is generated on stock-related data.

4. React-Based Frontend

Feature: The project uses React for building the user interface.

🧗 Challenges We Faced

Building this in 36 hours taught us that hackathons are really about rapid problem-solving:

Challenge 1: Google Finance Scraping

Problem: Google Finance's chart interface is dynamically rendered with complex JavaScript.
Solution: Instead of parsing charts directly, we extracted stock tickers from URLs and let users manually select date ranges—simpler UX, more reliable.

Challenge 2: API Rate Limits

Problem: APIs have strict limits, many are not free.
Solution: Searched for the best possible free API that fit our requirements

Challenge 3: AI Hallucinations

Problem: Early prompts caused the AI to "invent" news events that didn't happen.
Solution: Tested different AI models to showcase the one with the most accurate output and refined prompts to include:

Requests for all types of news to avoid bias
Source citations for every factual statement

Challenge 4: Making Finance Accessible

Problem: Our initial outputs used terms like "P/E ratio," "YoY growth," "institutional flows"—defeating the purpose.
Solution: Added a prompts to promote "Jargon-free" beginner-friendly language and tested on users with no experience in finance

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

✅ Built a functional Chrome extension from scratch in 36 hours
✅ Integrated 3+ APIs (Gemini, Alpha Vantage, Perplexity)
✅ Created an AI prompt that consistently produces beginner-friendly, accurate analysis
✅ Designed a clean, intuitive UI that anyone can use
✅ Solved a real problem we've experienced ourselves

But most of all, we're proud that this could actually help people.

Every feature—from the plain-language explanations to the source citations—was designed with one goal: empower everyday investors to understand their money.

📚 What We Learned

Technical Skills

Chrome Extension Development: content scripts, popup architecture
API Integration: Handling rate limits, async operations, error fallbacks
Prompt Engineering: Crafting AI prompts that produce consistent, reliable outputs

Domain Knowledge

Financial Markets: How earnings reports, news cycles, and sentiment drive prices
Retail Investor Behavior: What information sources they trust
Regulatory Considerations: Why disclaimers matter in fintech

Soft Skills

Rapid Prototyping: Building an MVP in hours, not weeks
Task Parallelization: Dividing work across team members efficiently
User-Centric Design: Constantly asking "Would a beginner understand this?"

Key Insight

The best AI products don't just answer questions—they teach users how to ask better ones.

Our "What to Research Next" feature doesn't just give answers; it empowers users to investigate further. That's true inclusive innovation.

🚀 What's Next

We're just getting started. Here's our roadmap:

Short-Term (Next Month)

[ ] Add social sentiment from Reddit (r/WallStreetBets) and Twitter
[ ] Multi-language support (Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi) for global accessibility
[ ] Firefox & Edge compatibility to reach more users
[ ] Historical pattern matching ("Similar events in the past")

Medium-Term (3-6 Months)

[ ] Mobile app for iOS and Android
[ ] Portfolio tracking with personalized insights
[ ] Real-time alerts when stocks you follow have major movements
[ ] Community features where users can share and discuss analyses

Long-Term Vision

[ ] Education platform with structured investing courses
[ ] API for developers to build on our analysis engine
[ ] Partnerships with schools to teach financial literacy
[ ] Freemium model with advanced features for serious investors

Our Dream

Make financial intelligence as accessible as Google Search.

No one should need a finance degree to understand their investments. No one should feel intimidated by Wall Street jargon. No one should lose out on making money because they didn't know why a stock moved.

If we can help even one person avoid a bad investment—or gain confidence to make a good one—this project was worth it.

🌍 Alignment with Hack the Valley Themes

💰 Smart Economies

We're making finance more efficient, secure, and accessible:

Efficiency: Instant analysis vs. hours of manual research
Security: Educated investors make better decisions
Accessibility: Free tools democratize financial intelligence

🌱 Inclusive Innovation by Dell Technologies

We're bridging gaps and empowering communities:

Accessibility: Plain-language explanations for all literacy levels
Representation: Building for individuals, not institutions
Empowerment: Teaching people to understand the stock market

Financial exclusion is a real problem. CityNews reports on a poll where 30% of Canadians do not feel as if they are financially literate, and only 15% believing they are knowledgeable on insurance, stocks, and investments (https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/11/04/financially-literate-canada-poll/). Our tool is a small step toward changing that.