Fintech Spotlight: ClosingBell Launches API Tracking Retail Trader Sentiment

Benzinga, a leading news and data provider, will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on November 11, 2021.

The event will award Benzinga Listmakers, those top companies part of Benzinga’s Global Fintech Index, for their accomplishments innovating, as well as merging the best of finance and technology.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga sat down with Scott Weiner, the founder at ClosingBell.

About ClosingBell: “I was struggling to find good ways of finding ideas — starting points — to look up and research stocks.”

That’s according to Weiner, who founded ClosingBell in 2014 as a collaborative stock trading platform that allows people a better way to share their ideas and learn about opportunities in the stock market.

Through ClosingBell, users share their trading theses and rate stocks. Then, the platform will rank users’ ratings based on the performance of their past stock picks.

“The whole concept is crowd-sourced stock tips,” he said. “I was never really interested in what any one person would say. I really care about what the best people in the group are saying, collectively.”

Currently, the platform has over 45,000 members and offers access to news and data — charting and fundamental statistics — on individual securities.

“ClosingBell collectively tracks and ranks everyone’s picks on a five-point scale — from strong sell to strong buy — and [users] also give price targets. So, it’s actually kind of just doing the work of what sell-side analysts would do. Here, though, the whole retail trading community can also give their input.”

Core Products: Aside from a mobile and web-friendly interface for rating, as well as viewing top community stock picks, there are two other components to ClosingBell.

The first is stock and ETF look-ups via the ClosingBell Slack Technologies Inc WORK app and the second is an API.

“Look-ups is an app that you can install in your Slack group. It was built four years ago as a growth hack to get the word out about ClosingBell,” the founder said. “It just so happens to be the most popular stock-related app on Slack, now.”

In light of the success, Weiner built a ClosingBell app for Discord groups, too, about five weeks ago.

ClosingBell also offers a self-service API for funds looking to capitalize on retail trader sentiment.

“Every time groups look up stocks, I’m anonymously logging the look-up,” Weiner noted in a discussion on providing funds a window into what’s trending across groups independently talking to each other. “I’m focused on this being a data platform … and, with the launch of this API, now there’s a self-service solution [that’s] focused on retail trader sentiment.”

Innovation Outlook: Given the success of ClosingBell’s stock look-up and data business, Weiner is looking to expand the depth and breadth of the company’s product offer.

“Recent events have shown that retail traders are a powerful market-moving force, … and funds are absolutely interested,” he said. “There’s nothing on the internet that actually attracts and ranks what the retail community is saying about stocks.”

Going forward, the company is also looking to continue its experimentation with emerging technologies like non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“I minted a token for ClosingBell on Rarible, an NFT marketplace, tied to a lifetime deal,” the founder said. “They put their ethereum wallet address on ClosingBell and it verifies you are the owner of the token — the lifetime deal — and it unlocks the content for you.”

In addition to the NFTs tied to 10-lifetime deals on the ClosingBell platform, Weiner may add NFT collectibles tied to meme stocks like GameStop Corporation GME and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc AMC.