Gr.in | Devpost

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Inspiration

gr.in is a pun between green investment and green, so we've registered for a domain as gr-in.tech!

In our pursuit of a greener world and a sustainable future, a shift towards more sustainable investments will help create a better world in the long term. Not only do sustainable investments help societies to grow, they can be beneficial to the investor as companies with strong profiles and commitments to a sustainable future tend to perform better financially in the long run.

However, knowing where to invest can be tricky. Amalgamating information from financial reports, ESG reports and general news sentiments can be difficult for a rookie investor, and we want to make this information as accessible as possible so that there can be no excuse to not invest sustainably.

In current available information, there is no one website that is able to recommend similar stocks with better ESG ratings. Furthermore, most ESG databases only provide a mapping of a company to its ESG rating, and do not do any analysis in terms of the best stocks to invest in within each category. For a rookie investor who doesn’t know about specific stocks and would like to make decisions based on industries, we want to be able to recommend the best stocks to invest in, taking into consideration sustainability and profitability.

What it does

Our web application caters to two types of investors.

For investors who have a portfolio and want to improve its ESG ratings, the website takes in a portfolio of stocks and recommends similar ones with higher ESG ratings.

For investors who are unsure about specific stocks but would like to invest in certain industries, keeping in mind the trade off between sustainability and profitability, the website takes in preferences and recommends a suitable portfolio.

How we built it

Backend: Python, Flask Frontend: JavaScript

Challenges we ran into

ESG rankings range from website to website. The one we decided to go with is csrhub.com, which only provides relative rankings within an industry without giving an objective score across industries. This can be worked around when comparing between similar stocks as these stocks would fall under the same industry anyways.

Also, companies may have more than one stocks, so company to ticker symbol is not a 1-to-1 mapping. For now, the first symbol listed is chosen.

What's next for Gr.in

The website was designed in a way that developers can easily customise it to extract data from a preferred database or calculate scores in a preferred way. For example, an alternative website that provides ESG ratings can be used instead of CSRHub, which we have chosen as a proof of concept.

Beyond this hackathon, extra functionalities can be added: *Capability for website to do the investment automatically for a rookie investor *Filter based on specific issues