Team Meraki's Blackrock Challenge

Have you ever wanted to be interested in risky stocks? Our mobile app will draw your interest by combining real, historical, stock-exchange data into making a competitive, score-based game!

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Inspiration

BlackRock's UGAHacks5/Hackathon WebTools challenge!

What it does

In the backend, uses BlackRock's Web API - Aladdin - to retrieve real, historical data about stocks' Performance Data so that the app can calculate a Volatility Index (VI) - how dynamic a stock's value is since a chosen, certain date.

This was our first hackathon so we were very excited to participate in a challenge. It was a lot of work brainstorming about our idea to meet the needs of the challenge, and we chose to make a mobile application using Android Studio because we believed that mobile apps represent one of the most accessible ways for the regular public to discover and explore new ideas. We wanted to meet the challenge of introducing the investing process to non-investors, and we think our mobile app idea met that challenge well. We also wanted to distinguish the app from more academic introductions to investing by engaging the users in a game that we hoped would spark interest in investing and help them develop an intuitive understanding of investing by having fun.

We worked on leveraging BlackRock's Aladdin API, specifically the performance data, to produce what we dubbed a 'volatility index' which measures of how risky a stock is by calculating the absolute difference in the levels of the stock over any given time interval provided by Aladdin. We wanted to provide the user a useful way to analyze a stock's risk, and we think the volatility index captures that in some sense.

A lot of the technologies we used for the challenge were new to us. From leveraging and studying the Aladdin API and its financial data to working with Android Studio for mobile app development, overcoming unfamiliarity was the biggest and most consistent challenge for us. We asked for help when it was the right time to, and we never stopped knocking our heads against the project's challenges, and we credit that with the success we were able to have.

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