PortfolioPulse

Investment analytics, when you need them, where you need them.

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Inspiration

In the modern day, financial security is not easy to achieve. With hiking costs of living and low-return interest rates, more Americans every year find themselves less than ready for savings and retirement. Consequently, an increasing number of people turn to investing--a higher-risk, higher-return activity that is easily impacted by current events. As investors ourselves, we noticed the difficulty in keeping track of these events and driving real-time conclusions without extensive expertise; we wanted to build a web interface that could help keep informed investment decisions more accessible to the public.

What it does

PortfolioPulse is a web interface that allows users to curate a list of companies in a portfolio and flag industries in a watchlist. A dynamically updating backend database is maintained that keeps track of recent events through a web scraper that iterated through a balanced selection of news sources, of which each source is then paired with a short, intuitive summary with generative AI. Then, a feed-style display of this information is returned to the user, where they are free to filter based on keyword, company, and industry.

TL;DR: A clean, intuitive interface that presents personalized investment insights you need, exactly when you need them.

How we built it

PortfolioPulse’s frontend is powered by React.js, with secure authentication provided by Firebase Auth. Information is collected from the web with a combination of the News API and regular expression filtering, paired with summarized information with the OpenAI python API-then, both the user and article datasets are saved and updated in a scalable DynamoDB dataset on AWS Cloud through a callable AWS Lambda function. Then, upon request, AWS API gateway works with a callable Lambda function to communicate back to the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Building PortfolioPulse wasn’t without its hurdles. From AWS to web crawlers to frontend, bootstrapping different parts of the project proved to be the most difficult. In particular, enabling the REST API to the frontend proved tricky due to CORS issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This marks our team’s first venture into developing an AI-powered web app—an achievement we’re incredibly proud of!

What we learned

Throughout this journey, we’ve gained invaluable experience working with AWS services, web scraping technologies, and React.js. This project has sharpened our technical skills and reinforced our ability to tackle complex development challenges, as well as challenging our capabilities as a team.

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