Stock Shock

Inspiration

Our group began by thinking about cool ways to implement web scraping, and beautiful-soup. We wanted to deal with data, so scraping stock information was a good fit, and naturally so was the Algolia search API.

What it does

Our webpage provides instantaneous access to company specific stock information. A user enters any company name from the NASDAQ-100, selects a statistic (stock price, dividend yield, market cap, P/E ratio, or payout ratio), and immediately receives back that information.

How we built it

We started by using beautiful-soup (through Python) to web scrape for the NASDAQ-100 companies and their corresponding statistics. We then used Python to dump this data into a JSON file, and import it into the Algolia API. Next, we wrote Python functions utilizing the API to search for and retrieve desired data points. After that we built our webpage using HTML, using Flask to facilitate communication with Python.

Challenges we ran into

There was a learning curve associated with every component of this project. However, most of our trouble came from getting our HTML page to communicate with our Python files. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and could not get our project live with under a domain name, but we uploaded all of our files, and the program should run locally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group was all first time hackers, we met each other on the first day, and didn't have a solid idea to start out with. We're all very proud of how we came together, and cranked out a hack that's actually pretty cool and useful!

What we learned

We all learned a lot about web scraping and the Algolia API through this project. We also had fun expanding our knowledge of Python and HTML, doing things we hadn't every tried before.

What's next for Stock Shock

If we had more time to work on Stock Shock, we would love to implement some type of machine learning to give users dynamic stock information. Maybe find a way to store data so that we could predict stock trends at a some level.