Outsider Trading

Senators make some suspiciously good trades, want in on their trading data? Follow their trades and make even better ones with Outsider Trading.

Comment

Inspiration

Politicians make a lot of money. Like, a lot. After a thorough analysis of how politicians apply their skill sets to faithfully "serve the general public", we realized that there's a hidden skill that many of them possess. It is a skill that hasn't been in the spotlight for some time. It is the skill which allowed US senator, Richard Burr, to sell 95% of his holdings in his retirement account just before a downturn in the market (thus avoiding $80,000 in losses and generating a profit upwards of $100k). This same skill allowed several senators like Spencer Bachus who had access to top secret meetings discussing the 2008 stock market crash and it's inevitably to heavily short the market just before the crash, generating a 200% per 1% drop in the NASDAQ. So, we decided that... senators know best! Our project is about outsider trading, which essentially means an outsider (you) get to trade! It allows you to track and copy the live trades of whatever politician you like.

Why the idea works and what problem is solves

We have a term called "recognition by ignition", a simple set of words that describe how this unconventional approach works. Our system has the ability to, by virtue of the data that is available to it, prioritize the activity of Senators previously engaged in suspicious trading activities. When these Senators make a big move, everyone following them receives a message via our InfoBip integration, and knows, temporarily acting as a catalyst for changes in the value of that stock, at best just enough to draw the scrutiny of financial institutions, essentially serving as an extra layer of safety checks while consistently being a trustworthy platform to trade on, ensured by wallet management and transactions through Circle integration.

What it does

Outsider trading gets the trading data of a large set of politicians, showing you their trading history and allowing you to select one or more politicians to follow. After depositing an amount into outsider trading, our tool either lets you manually assess the presented data and invest wherever you want, or automatically follow the actions of the politicians that you have followed. Sp. when they invest in stock x, our tools proportionally invest for you in the same stock. When they pull out of stock y, your bot will pull out of that stock too! This latter feature can be simulated or followed through with actual funds to track the portfolio performance of a certain senator.

How we built it

We built our web app using ReactJS for the front end connected to a snappy Node.js backend, and a MySQL server hosted on RDS. Thanks in part to the STOCK act of 2012, most trading data for US senators has to be made public information, so we used the BeautifulSoup library to Web Scrape and collect our data.

Challenges we ran into

Naturally, 36 hours (realistically less) of coding, would involve tense sessions of figuring out how to do certain things. We saw the direct value that the services offered by InfoBip and Circle could have on our project so we got to work implementing that and as expected had to traverse a learning curve with implementing the APIs, this job was however made easier because of the presence of mentors and good documentation online that allowed us to integrate an SMS notification system and a system that sets up crypto wallets for any user that signs up. Collaborating effectively is one of the most important parts of a hackathon, so we as a team learnt a lot more about effective and efficient version control measures and how to communicate and divide roles and work in a software focused development environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A complete front-end for the project was finished in due time
  • A fully functional back-end and database system to support our front-end
  • InfoBip integration to set up effective communication with the customer. Our web-app automatically sends an SMS when a senator you are following makes a trade.
  • Crypto wallets for payment, implemented with Circle!
  • A well designed and effective database hosted on an RDS instance

What we learned

While working on this project we had to push ourselves outside of all of our comfort zones. Going into this project none of us knew how to web scrape, set up crypto wallets, create SMS/email notification systems, or work with RDS instances. Although some of these features may be bare bones, we are leaving this project with new knowledge and confidence in these areas. We learnt how to effectively work and scale a full stack web-app, and got invaluable experience on how to collaborate and version control as a team.

What's next for Outsider Trading

This is only the beginning for us, there's a lot more to come!

  • Increased InfoBip integration with features like: 1) Weekly summary email of your portfolio (We have investment data and financial data on Circle that can simply be summarized with the API we use to make charts on the portfolio page and then attach that through Infobip through the email. 2) SMS 2.0 features can be used to directly allow the user to invest from their messaging app of choice

  • Improved statistical summaries of your own trades and those of each senator with models trained on trading datasets that can detect the likelihood of foul play in the market.

  • Zapier integration with InfoBip to post updates about senator trades regularly to a live Twitter (X) page.

  • An iOS and android native app, featuring all of our current features an more.

Share this project:

Updates