Eat My Shorts

On load
Result for GME

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the recent surge (and subsequent meme'ing) of the whole r/WallStreetBets $GME saga. Our thought process then became: "So the big Wall Street firms obviously have a way of determining whether a stock is worth the risk of shorting.. How do they determine that?". Now what most people don't realize, is that a lot of this information is readily available online. However, it is hard to understand what the terms and numbers mean to the average retail investor. Our goal with our web app is to provide an idea of whether a stock is in that prime position to be short squeezed.

What it does

Our web app takes in a stock ticker (i.e GME, AAPL, etc..), calculates whether the stock is either: Healthy, low chance of a Short Squeeze, or high chance of a Short Squeeze through a scoring system we created though stats collected from Yahoo Finance.

How we built it

For this challenge, and it being both of our first Hackathon's, we wanted to use it as an opportunity to learn new skills. We decided to use React for the frontend. For the backend, we used python's request library to obtain the needed info from Yahoo Finance, and then created our own API endpoint with Flask for our frontend to retrieve relevant and calculated data. Next, we built our scoring system for the stocks, and then deployed the whole thing using AWS and docker.

Challenges we ran into

DevOps. We had 0 experience deploying a full-stack type of web app online. One or two fatal crashes later and we were able to finally get it up and running!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to use AWS and Docker more, building something outside of school, especially during COVID where it seems every waking hour has been devoted to McGill.

What we learned

Building a front-end with a new framework and a time crunch is harder than it seems. A lot of functionality we would've liked to have takes much longer to implement.