Cognitio

iPhone running Cognitio

Inspiration

We are a team that loves to trade in the financial markets – every opening bell is a breath of excitement that invigorates the mind and body. It’s neither an art or a science, but importantly to us, the market is a reflection and understanding of the world we live in. Because of our passion for investing, we decided to create a data visualization and analysis aid to assist investors of all backgrounds. We named our creation Cognitio, the Latin term for knowledge and learning. Despite its lack of need for expensive market information, Cognitio can capture interesting visuals and pertinent information for all users. We truly wanted to create an app that could share our love of investing with everyone, not just financiers and business students

What it does

Cognitio creates displays of correlation amongst securities, currencies, and commodities; as well as volatility and RSI information on a sidebar. It gives the novice investor easy to read charts which teach about the relevancy and polarity between securities. Alternatively, experienced investment professionals can gather a quick market snapshot through our weighting emphasis on unusual volatility, RSI’s, and real-time updates. The main feature is the idea of demonstrating stock market data in the form of relationships, instead of the typical list of flash quotes.

How we built it

Cognitio is built on a Google Cloud Compute backend running Ubuntu. The user experience is built in Objective-C. Various online databases including the Blackrock API were used for market data.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty deciding on an idea for a finance application since there’s a variety of tools already on the market, we strived to be different. Once we did finalize on our idea, our next trouble became finding APIs that would give us the info we wanted. We began building our app based off a large, Excel workbook that was made with formulas and manually pulled data from Yahoo Finance. This was before we got the data we needed from BlackRock’s API and the web. Afterwards, it became fun challenge of programming, math, and server setup!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished with our overall goal without cutting many corners.

What we learned

We all got a chance to learn about different things! Just to list a few, we were able to pick up some intermediate Excel, PHP, Google Cloud Platform, Python, statistics, and even more about stocks! Further, the support of some of the sponsors helped us tremendously.

What's next for Cognitio

We had a fun time working on this hack! Our goal for Cognitio is to continue grabbing more data so that we can provide even more calculations for users. Further, we would also like to continue with graph setups that can display information beautifully and in unique ways, this is just the start. Overall, we feel that there is so much potential that we would love to expand on.