Portfolio bakery

Inspiration

We were inspired by the issue regarding handover and research transfer within Quant teams, where though documentation would remain, it was still a difficulty to successfully reproduce the orignal researcher's vision. Alpha decays and model drifts also piqued our interest, inspirng us to develop a dashboard to assist teams in viewing and managing the status of projects. But ultimately, we focused on assisting research handover between team members and managing transfer and after an interview, learnt that a checklist and documentation system would be quite convenient with the clairty and ease of acess of research handovers. Therefore, taking these matters into consideration, we took developed Portfolio Bakery.

What it does

A tool that assists mid to big quant trading teams hand over research properly. When a researcher leaves or moves to a new project, our bakery keeps all the important context (code, data, assumptions and notes on what didn't work), alongside important elements such as points of contact and a link to the codebase, attached to the model, essentially as a hubbase to assist quant trading teams.

How we built it

The issue regarding research handover was what kickstarted our plan to develop a site that assist quant teams in managing team models and increases the efficeincy and clarity of handing over model. After conduting our research, the three of us then designed and drawn out the flexible functions of our site, for which we could use as a checklist to implementThe initial Site was built intially via V0 by Vercel. We followed by linking the site to GitHub and linking it to three parallel VS code for each of us to experiment and employ our own tasks with the help of agents such as copilot before committing it to the main repository. After conducting a major important interview with a Canva engineer, we deployed more changes upon our site that were inspired from his suggestions including repository links, past recordings(the current way of handover documentation) and more. Overall the process stemmed from splitting tasks between the three of us and committing our functions change on change.

Challenges we ran into

As first years, one major problem we ran into intially was setting up the startup page, alongside finding our way around Github forks, VS code and syncing three parallel workspaces, which we unfortunately had no prior experince in. Though eventually after setting this out, our workflow increased signficaintly. And hence, we were able to push our our plans and functions into the exisitng website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Setting up VS code, node.js and other software defnitely, as we nearly lost our minds then. But we're proud of how we prevailed in the face of these challenges, having worked together as a team to help each other through the development of our site. Though, most of all, we are proud that as first years, we managed to identify an issue with quants which we did not have much experince about and after 2 days of energy fulled work developed a prototype of our Portfolio Bakery

What we learned

We have learnt a plethora of skills from crafting this project alone. Not only have we explored in detail the role and importance of Quants, along with prominent issues in the Quant world, but we also learnt how to manage our way through Vs code, GitHub and many other software. Though most importantly, we also learnt the importance of functioning as a team, planning and developing our website through a small timeframe. The three of us begun as quite underskilled in our first hackathon, but ultimately it was an incredible learning opportunity to develop our skills related in the industry development process, involving both mechancal and creative design.

What's next for Portfolio bakery

There are many other elements we wish to include for Portfolio Bakery such as fleshing out our backend design and potentailly incorporating databases as we progress through our degree. Though, most importantly, Portfolio Bakery would greatly benefit from one on one interviews and interactions from a wide range of Quants and developers across the indsutry. Though we only managed to speak with one Canva Industry professtional, he gave us incredible advice that greatly elevated our site with important functions such as ability to view past meetings, codebase links,