Inspiration - Young people are more aware than ever of their impact on the world. They're more selective about the services they use, often gravitating towards companies known for charity and progressiveness. With the emergence of Robinhood, Webull, and SoFi, millions of new people are becoming investors, but trading platforms do not show a company's ethics. That is why we wanted to create a service that offers this data, allowing people to ethically invest their money.

What it does - We created a python script that scrapes Google finance and other news sources for a company's information. Then it performs sentiment analysis and generates a score, which is averaged. If the articles' overall tone is negative, it's a sign that the company is scandalous and likely cutting corners on its ethical obligations. Although our website isn't yet live, the development version can set up user accounts and allow the user to interact with a series of APIs, such as Alpaca's paper trading API, to get stock data and 'attempt' to connect with our morality analyzer.

How I built it - The Frontend is written using React, which interacts with a Node.JS server, MongoDB database, and market research APIs: Alpaca and Financial Modeling Prep. The morality analyzer was written using Python, utilizing Algorithmia for sentiment analysis and the BeautifulSoup library for web scraping.

Challenges I ran into - It was tough for me to scrape data off popular websites Wall street journal, yahoo finance, etc. because they use iframes. Google finance has kept their websites open to help develop such tools. The Frontend was also quite challenging. Dealing with so many API calls made managing data mind-melting.

What's next for Ethical Trading Website

Developing a nice front end- Connecting front end and backend by hosting on GCP. Also separating ethicalness by different categories.

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