EasyInvest

Inspiration

According to Financial Samurai, and various other financial blogs, 38% of stocks today are owned by the wealthiest 1% of Americans. As a result, the gap in the net worth between the wealthy and the average American households continues to increase. The Blackrock API Challenge motivated us to reduce this disparity and make an app that would make an investment in stocks less intimidating.

What it does

EasyInvest aims to provide every user with a custom portfolio by taking only two inputs: their initial investment amount and the target amount they aim to achieve.

How we built it

We have built an API that provides the best portfolio custom to the user as per the input parameters they have provided. Using stock tickers, the API prepares a number of portfolios out of which it selects the best one. After fetching the return map from the Blackrock API, the user is presented with the portfolio which is best suited for them.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the web services we developed with the UI was a tough challenge, since we were facing a CORS misconfiguration. However, we were able to overcome that hurdle by changing the scope of the "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" in the response header server-side. Therefore, we successfully integrated the Spring Boot web service which returned the return map from the Blackrock API to the UI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For presenting the best portfolios for the user, the calculations behind the API involved optimising (maximising) the Sharpe ratio and using the Monte Carlo method.

What we learned

Through the Blackrock API challenge, we were able to dabble with tech in finance (fintech) for the first time. We were very pleased to discover how well these fields can support each other.

What's next for EasyInvest

We aim to add more parameters that the user can input, such as risk tolerance. This is so that we can further customize the user experience and return investment portfolios with better asset allocation.