Stock Talk

Inspiration

I've always had a passion for trading stocks and managing my own finances. However, I find it difficult to determine what the best strategies are or know who to listen to when it comes to stock data. That's why I'm creating Stock Talk to help investors like me to create and compare investment strategies with everyone around the world.

What it does

Stock Talk allows users to create investment "strategies" which contains one or more stock transactions with a buy and sell date some time in the future. These strategies can then be monitored in real time to evaluate their gains/losses. As well, users are able to follow other users on the platform to see their investment strategies in a twitter like feed system. Also users can participate in the global leader board for the most investment gains.

How we built it

For the frontend I used Svelte and TailwindCSS. The backend is built on Node.js with express and graphql. All data is stored in a self hosted Postgresql database that is accessed using the prisma library. The project is deployed on a Digital Ocean linux server.

Challenges we ran into

Getting live stock updates proved to be significantly more difficult than I originally anticipated. Not necessarily from a technological perspective but rather from a scaling perspective. There are thousands of actively traded stocks, and users, especially on mobile, do not have the processing power, nor the bandwidth to get market updates and then compute all the results in real time. This means that I had to settle for a one minute polling interval to receive stock pricing updates and then compute this information on the server side. Users then only need to subscribe to updates on users and strategies that they follow and no additional work is needed on their end

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that I was able to build a full stack application that is not only fast and scaleable but also includes quite a few extra features that are nice to have: including full PWA support, live updates, and a UI that, in my opinion, looks very clean and modern.

What we learned

I learned quite a few new technologies that make the project possible like SSE to relay information from the server to the client, and PWA support for websites to allow users to save the project almost as if it is a native app. As well, I learned how to efficiently server large amounts of information to multiple clients in a scaleable way

What's next for Stock Talk

I would love to turn Stock Talk into an actual company after this hackathon. I think that is has a large audience that would be able to get a lot of benefit from this platform. In term of features, a more advanced strategy generation system from be valuable. There is a large community of traders called "algo traders" that trade stocks using scripts. Currently, Stock Talk is not quite ready to take on this level of customization but in the future, this was be a great opportunity to attract a new audience to this project.

Built With

• digitalocean
• graphql
• javascript
• node.js
• postgresql
• prisma
• sql
• svelte
• tailwind