Inspiration

Today trading is in the hands, and often pocket, of ever American, not just large corporations and the rich. However, the tools that the big players use have not yet reached the masses. We wanted to change that.

What it does

TotallyNotDayTrading allows a user to automate trading on the stock market using their Alpaca Market account. The user can choose between multiple algorithms for the website to use in order to decide when to buy and sell stocks.

How we built it

We used the external python library Flask to set up our website, and the Alpaca Trade API to collect the information about each of the stocks, as well as the user's account balance and buying power.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled mightily with the multithreading. It was very hard for us to figure out how to stop only one thread if the user changes their algorithm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud our user friendly interface, the goal of this project was to eliminate decision making for the user, allowing them to be an active trader with strategy, without having to research.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development, including the python frameworks Django and Flask. We learned how to set up an app using Google Cloud's App Engine, and host it on a custom domain. We learned about different ways people may decide on when to buy or sell their stocks, and how to make algorithms that make those same decisions. We learned how to use external python libraries, such as the Alpaca Trade API, which allows a connection between the file and a user's online Alpaca account.

What's next for TotallyNotDayTrading

We would like to learn more about Multi-Threading, especially being able to kill threads. We would also like to add a few more algorithms to the website and allow to user to add there own algorithms to create a community of algorithm sharing. We also agreed that if we reached 1,000 users we would reach out to Alpaca to ask for a commission on the fees they charge per trade.

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