Inspiration
Our team is passionate about using technology in the financial industry. Most of us trade on a regular basis and we have long awaited the chance to work on a technological application to solve different financial problems and make a positive impact on the financial community. Hack the North presented the perfect opportunity for us to build such an application.
What it does do
PriceAlert is a web application that enables investors to be automatically notified when trading prices of different indexes fall or rise beyond certain criteria, making investing both easy and convenient.
How I built it
The application was built using the Flask framework. The frontend consisted of HTML/CSS and JavaScript while the backend primarily consisted of Python. Ajax calls transferred data between the two mediums. The Bloomberg API was intergraded within the codebase to receive and process financial data regarding indexes and the Twilio API was used to send automated notification messages to investors. Finally the Highcharts API was used to create beautiful interactive graphs for data visualizations.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge revolved around integrating the Bloomberg API as the API was not capable of providing real-time data. As a result, extra work was required to first retrieve past data and then model it for users to perceive it as future data. Furthermore, development was slowed down due to large volumes of data that took long times to be retrieved and processed due to slow internet speeds.
Accomplishments that im proud of
Working with flask was a new technology that we have not used before. Coming up with creative ways to use bloombers data was also interesting, as there was a smaller volume of data than we had planned for - our project scope kept on changing.
What I learned
How to use flask, bloombergs API, how to use Twilio. Various new features and functions in highcharts were explored as well.
What's next for price alert
Distrupting the financial alert market.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.