The Trade Sim

Inspiration

Our inspiration mainly came from the desire to understand and formulate some way to help make investing something that should be lent only to financial advisors and more into the hands of aspiring investors.

What it does

The app is straightforward—a learning simulation that allows the user to input how they want to invest, how much, and for how long via preset or chosen values. From there the app pulls historical values from Yahoo Finance to show results in fan charts for the whole portfolio and each individual investment, along with statistics that quantify risk.

How we built it

We divided the work evenly between us. For the back-end of the application and data collection, we used Python to generate the entirety of the source code. Along with that, we used different generative techniques to form a general idea on how the dashboard is going to be formatted with the charting and ultimately combined the two.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we've faced while working on this project was nailing down the final iteration of the layout. We went through many different phases with the overall layout, but we ultimately settled with a more modest and simple design. Another challenge we've faced was the domain issue. There was an issue establishing a website to display our application, which, unfortunately, was never resolved. One last challenge we've faced was trying to merge the two parts of the project. One particular file was the main issue for preventing the joining of design and technical.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel this whole project is a major accomplishment. Given the time constraints and effort we pulled together for, we feel proud that we managed to make something executable and product-ready without any major setbacks. Particularly the connection between our team, remaining communicative and supportive of every step in development. Additionally, the technical aspect of creating an app from the ground up is another ideal we are particularly proud of.

What we learned

We learned how to incorporate the use of AI into application development for interface customization, the general format of how an investing front should look, the general gist of how Yahoo Finance works, and understanding what demands investors might benefit from when features are implemented/available.