Sapling

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was to empower everyday individuals who want to begin their investing journey. There's a common perception that only wall street financers with tons of money can invest in stock; we wanted to challenge the status quo by providing an innovative approach to determining the optimal stocks to invest in.

What it does

We have created a unique investment recommendation algorithm by considering key metrics of a stock's performance: social media sentiment, social impact, profit margin, average 5-day change, net promoter score (NPS), and net profit margin (NPM). Users will choose what category of stock they would like to invest in -- technology, cryptocurrency, pharmaceuticals, international, and major players-- and our platform will provide consul correspondingly. For users who are interested in starting their investment portfolio, we have also built an education component that addresses the basics of investing.

How we built it

We approached this task with a divide-and-conquer mindset. While Ananya focused on building the front end of Sapling, Aditi concentrated on developing the social media sentiment analysis extraction element of our application, while Rishika worked on algorithm development and calculation. We used a combination of React and Flask to develop our service.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced while developing Sapling was ensuring that we found datasets that accurately represented our problem parameters. Many datasets were either too large or too small, or they were outdated and didn't match with current consumer trends. We overcame this obstacle by creating a unique blend of data that was extracted directly from social media pages and Yahoo Finance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're definitely amazed at how much we accomplished in 24 hours! We are also super proud of how we were able to creatively approach our problem by including unconventional metrics not typically used in investing.

What we learned

We all came to the realization that today's modern world is extremely interconnected. Trends that may seem unrelated to one topic can actually have the most impact and every post on the internet has the power to influence consumers regardless of its validity.

What's next for Sapling

We look forward to integrating additional metrics to improve our investment score analysis. Additionally, we would like to market our offering so that more individuals can empower themselves through investing.