About Stock Alarm

The Story

I've been building financial data products since the dot-com era. In 2009, I left Google to co-found YCharts, where I served as CEO. YCharts is a financial terminal for investment professionals. We raised over $15 million from Morningstar, Reed Elsevier, and the Hyde Park Angels, and grew it to serve thousands of advisors in a $25 billion market before it was acquired by LLR Partners. The company continues to scale with over 100 employees today. That experience taught me what professional investors actually need: not more data, but timely awareness.

The problem I kept running into — as a builder and as an investor — was the same one everyone hits: you can't watch everything. You set a mental note to check a stock at a certain price, and by the time you remember, the move already happened. I wanted a platform that would watch the markets for me so I didn't have to stay glued to my screens.

In 2019, two engineers from Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — Morgan Howell and Yahia Bakour — built exactly that. Stock Alarm solved the “last mile problem” for investors: push notifications, emails, texts, and even phone calls when your alerts trigger. It earned a 4.8-star rating from 7,000+ reviews because it did one thing really well.

In 2023, through my firm Center Mark Capital, I acquired Stock Alarm with 180,000+ users. Since then, we've grown to 295,000+ investors and expanded the platform from a pure alerting tool into a full research terminal — with screening, AI analysis, heatmaps, power rankings, macro dashboards, and institutional-grade research on 3,600+ stocks. All built on the same foundation: the markets watch themselves, and you get told when something matters.

After building WallStreetView, WallStreetSelect, YCharts, and now Stock Alarm, I've spent over 15 years on the same question: how do you give individual investors the same awareness that professionals have? Stock Alarm is the best answer I've found.