Inspiration

I have been a vegan for nearly four years. I think that having our consumption align with our ethical standards is an important way to contribute to improving the world, as unlike say voting there are no outdated electoral systems or gerrymandering to erase any impact our actions may have. If our expenditures on products should go towards financing companies whose practices we align with, why shouldn't our expenditures on securities? Paladin seeks to inform retail investors about the companies that rank highly on the issues that matter to them.

What it does

User inputs weights for certain EGS factors, list of tickers is re-rendered in descending order of resulting score

How we built it

Frontend: React Backend: Express.js Scripts: Python Storage: MongoDB Data Collection: SEC API Hosting: Heroku

Challenges we ran into

I found the Python scripts for handling the data to be very challenging. I had thought that

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of making the application relatively usable with an intentional design that makes clear the steps required to improve the service.

What we learned

I learned a lot about the architecture of more complex applications that cannot really be implemented in a single directory/repository. I had to handle sending calls back and forth between the frontend, backend, and database as well as generating and processing data with Python scripts. I also learned that search requires a ridiculous amount of memory for indexing and is very inconvenient to deal with.

What's next for Paladin

The most impactful next steps will involve improving the scoring methodology. Increasing the size of the dataset as well as the explainability and reliability of the scoring will significantly improve the quality of the product.

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