Inspiration
Tracking a companies financial movements is one of the most common ways for investors to help make educated investment decisions. Wouldn't it be nice to have something that allows you to type in your company of choice in, and to be able to see all of the relevant financial information to help you make your decisions? Our group often looks at things like balance sheets, cash flow statements, and more before deciding to invest, and so we figured that having an app that simplifies this process could come in handy for not only us, but many other finance enthusiasts.
What it does
Our app has an interactive GUI, in which the initial window will be a simple search bar with a message asking the user to input their company ticker symbol of choice. After doing so and hitting search, a new window will open offering a plethora of useful information, ranging from the live stock price, to a nice paragraph detailing some history and facts regarding that specific company. In addition, there are several buttons on this page that allow you to view various financial statements; Each financial statement includes a few years of data, allowing the user to spot trends between specific financial data.
How we built it
We built the program entirely off of Python! By leveraging several powerful libraries, such as CTkinter, we were able to create a fully interactive, easy-to-use graphical user interface that has a modern look and feel. We then used the power of the FMP API to retrieve all the financial data that was required, and used several algorithms to take the API given json format data into a readable form in which we would then present on our GUI.
Challenges we ran into
Our main challenge was working with the API, and time. The FMP API only allows a certain amount of requests per day, and we had soon reached that limit. To work around this, we had to purchase a monthly subscription with the API, which would give use access to unlimited requests. Our other issue was time, given the 24 hour time span of the project, creating the entire GUI, styling it, and adding all the functions we wanted turned out to be quite the time crunch. We had initially hoped to add several other features to our app, however due to time, we had to leave some out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of each of our team member's resilience in completing this project! After changing our idea to this one at 2pm on the starting day, we had already suffered a loss in time; We did not let that phase us though, and we continued to code all night until we were finished. We ended up going to bed around 8am , and we are proud of each other's work ethic in getting the project completed.
What we learned
We worked with various new libraries and frameworks, and this was the first time any of us had worked with a GUI or an API in python. We had to spend a considerable amount of time learning how to use and manipulate the two concepts, but now after completion we feel much more confident in our abilities to work with GUI's and API's.
What's next for CompanyStocker
As aforementioned, we had to leave out several features due to the time restraint. Our desire now is to complete the rest of the functionality that we wanted to add! This includes incorporating the ability to view recent news articles on the desired company, the ability to check the social sentiment of a stock, and ESG benchmarking.
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