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Inspiration

We are a team composed of entry-level investors. We all come from different backgrounds and levels of experience, but one thing we all have in common is our journey to understanding the stock market. Our journey was filled with roadblocks due to our lack of understanding of the markets. Anshu, specifically, found himself constantly scrolling through endless news articles, searching for news about the market and major company activities. Spending time with friends, we also tried talking about topics such as investing or portfolio management, which many of our friends did not have much experience in. Our goal was to create a website that people like our friends could use to learn about investing strategies and become more financially literate to improve their quality of life in the future.

What it does

InvestED serves as an intuitive entry point for beginner investors with little to no prior experience. Our platform provides portfolio management tools that allow users to create hypothetical investment portfolios and analyze key metrics such as market volatility, stock performance predictions, and overall portfolio health. This analysis is enhanced by Perplexity, an advanced online search tool that we used to perform powerful sentiment analysis on relevant news articles.

Additionally, InvestED features a dedicated learning hub where users can explore fundamental investment principles and gain insights into various asset classes, including stocks, bonds, and diversification. Through a user-friendly graphical interface, we illustrate key investment concepts such as risk management and period analysis for long-term financial planning. To enhance market awareness, InvestED incorporates nodal visualizations that highlight industry-leading companies and their latest activities through dynamically updated headlines. This feature enables users to stay informed about market trends and make more informed investment decisions based on real-time developments.

How we built it

We combined modern front-end technologies, sentiment analysis powered by AI, and finance principles to create investED. The tech stack we used includes:

Frontend:

React + Vite: Fast and efficient UI development.
Tailwind CSS: Sleek, responsive, and modern styling.
JSX: Streamlined component-based UI structure.

Backend:

Flask + Python: Lightweight and scalable backend.
Firebase Firestore: Real-time, cloud-hosted NoSQL database.
Firebase Authentication: Secure and seamless user authentication.

AI and APIs:

Yahoo Finance API: Real-time stock market data and insights.
Perplexity API: AI-driven financial research and analysis.
Alpha Vantage API: Market analytics, indicators, and stock predictions.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into successfully pulling different versions from branches. When pulling, we often spent time figuring out what dependencies we were missing and how to set up a virtual environment for our backend files in Python. However, this made us become more comfortable with git commands and understand how these commands are very useful in a group project setting. We also had a lot of trouble connecting the front end in React and Tailwind CSS to the backend, which was primarily made in Firebase. This led to a lot of frustrating moments where a function would unexpectedly time out or wouldn’t return the correct value from the API call and would even sometimes crash the entire site. Nevertheless, our group persevered through these challenges and built a finance product that millions of users could potentially benefit from.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the core functionalities of our program is to inform the user on investment types and strategies. It was important to feed this information to the user without bombarding them and making it boring. We brainstormed a lot of ideas, including a fantasy draft stock game, and eventually picked a simulation where the user is prompted with scenarios in which they have to decide whether to buy, sell, or hold. To make the entire game more interesting and interactive, we used special CSS to shake the screen and a green flash. To prevent it from being repetitive, we also used Perplexity AI to generate scenarios.

The nodal visualization of industry-leading companies was also impressive for us to finish. We modeled the visualization off the GitHub branching system because we feel it has close similarities to how interconnected the stock market is. The visualization updates every day with new headlines using the Yahoo finance search API.

We also enjoyed programming the chart visualization on the portfolio page. Initially, the animations were extremely choppy due to the element being re-rendered on every change of the time series. However, to fix this, we had a clever idea to render the entire thing on the opening of the page and just zoom in whenever the time series was changed - it made the animation significantly smoother.

What we learned

Throughout the 36-hour hackathon, we gained valuable technical expertise in languages and frameworks such as React.js, Tailwind CSS, Python, and Firebase. Beyond technical development, the experience also strengthened our soft skills, including effective communication, collaboration, and time management. We honed our ability to think critically under pressure, adapt to unforeseen challenges, and iterate quickly based on real-time feedback. The fast-paced environment emphasized the importance of resilience, problem-solving, and teamwork, as well as the ability to actively listen and integrate diverse perspectives into our project. Ultimately, the hackathon reinforced not only our technical proficiency but also our ability to navigate high-stakes situations with agility and strategic decision-making.

What's next for investED

In the future, we plan to enhance the website’s visual appeal by incorporating refined animations, a more intuitive user interface, and engaging interactive elements to create a seamless and enjoyable user experience. A key feature in our roadmap is the introduction of personalized user profiles, enabling individuals to track their progress, monitor achievements, and save preferences for a more tailored investment journey. To further gamify the learning experience, we will implement an awards system that incentivizes users through randomized challenges and high-score achievements in interactive mini-games. This system aims to foster a sense of accomplishment, encourage continued learning, and make financial education more engaging. Additionally, we plan to introduce a dynamic graphing function that visualizes projected stock performance based on user-selected portfolios. This feature will provide an intuitive and data-driven way for users to analyze potential investment outcomes, helping them make more informed decisions. By integrating this visual component, we aim to enhance user engagement while offering valuable insights that can shape their investment strategies. Through these improvements, our goal is to create a more interactive, user-friendly, and educational platform that empowers beginner investors to navigate the financial markets with confidence.