Social Investing

Main dashboard displays portfolio progress and allocation.
Friends and familys portfolios

Inspiration

Social Investing began with a team of five undergraduate students with an interest in finance, cloud services, and web applications.

What it does

Social Investing provides an online platform for connected friends and family to build wealth, discuss market funds, and invest together. The Social Investing platform allows users to personally pick and choose market funds, assemble their own portfolio, and browse the portfolios of their friends and family. Our wish is that by seeing people around them budgeting and investing their money smartly, users will be exposed to smart spending and see the benefit of investments and long-term returns. Putting their minds together and actively taking charge of their finances.

How we built it

Front-end UI/UX development:

This web application was built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In addition, Bootstrap and Angular JS make this application responsive, visually appealing and easy to use.

Back-end development:

Our back-end development was built primarily with JavaScript and Node.JS. The use of JavaScript as the single programming language allowed us to fluidly transition from our front-end and back-end development platforms.

Third Party Libraries:

The following APIs played an immense role in assembling stock information, providing statistics, and providing smooth data storage for our web application.

BlackRock API Yahoo Finance API IEX Cloud Google Cloud Platform - Firebase

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges in building this application. The BlackRock API proved to be difficult to work with, and we relied on additional financial APIs such as IEX Cloud and Yahoo Finance for better real-time fund data. Another instance was collaborating with each other and merging code. This required a level of communication that all of us weren't used to at first, but we eventually got the hang of it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the conclusive functionality of our web application and the clean user interface. The idea for this project was formed approximately half a day into the hackathon, but we were able to rally and push ourselves to stay focused and grind it out.

We believe a good experience stems from a clean user interface and an experience that caters to the customer's needs. Our UI is simply that.

What we learned

In developing this website, we further expanded our flexibility with a team, the ability to work, share code and solve problems within a group, as well as an overall improvement in our development skills using HTML, JavaScript, and Node JS.

What's next for Social Investing

Social investing still has room for improvement, and its social dynamic can be further expanded. Given that a minimal amount of time was given for a fairly complicated idea, the finished product we have does not reflect the full potential of social investing.

Built With

Submitted to

LA Hacks 2019

Created by

I worked on the frontend and created the homepage's UI for the project. I have had previous experience in CSS and HTML, but never with a large project!

eadamian
I worked on the backend and frontend of the project. My research in finance helped me to come up with the novel of idea for sharing and discussing portfolios with friends.

Abraham Yepremian
I worked on the back-end and front-end of the project. I learned about the rubber ducky debugger. Also I learned about utilizing external APIs such as BlackRock.

Alex Liu
Kevin Yao
Splintzz