Inspiration
Our inspiration came from the fact that many people (including us) who are new to finance and trading often find it overwhelming due to the complex jargon and information overload. We wanted to create a simple solution that provides an educational based, entry-level introduction to technical analysis (TA) focusing on ease of understanding.
What it does
trendTech allows users to input any stock ticker (eg. TSLA, APPL, NKE) into the search bar, which will return a daily, weekly or monthly visualisation of the past 23 years of that stock's historical data using Alpha Vantage's API. Users can choose to deselect or select specific TA metrics, the most common and simple to understand ones being EMA, SMA and RSI, which we included. The graphs act as guides, showing a more tangible perspective on how market trends have changed over time and the practical applications of each metric with real-life trading scenarios. This is meant to be a reference point for users to evaluate and assess their comprehension of the TA metrics they've learned to inform their own predictions.
How we built it
Using ~23 years of historical stock data from Alpha Vantage, we parsed it and used pandas to perform the TA. In the front-end, we used React to build the website and used Flask to integrate the front and back-ends together.
Challenges we ran into
As a group of second years who had only finished their first year last semester, we were completely roaming around in the dark when it came to how to actually implement our idea. Our limited coding experience meant that learning React (including JS and CSS) and Flask was mostly on-the-go, and we ran into multiple challenges trying to incorporate the front- to the back- end. It also meant that we weren't able to incorporate some of our initial ideas that were meant to set us apart from trading platforms already on the market, such as a simple ML model (by Connor in ipynb) that would predict upwards or downwards trends, and a live News feed for the specific stock (by Connie in React).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of ourselves for learning so many new things (languages, packages, modelling) in the span of only 24 hours. When something went wrong, we didn't let it bog ourselves down for too long, so we're also proud of our positivity that helped pull the team through when things didn't go as planned.
What we learned
It's important to recognise how your skillset and the time constraint can affect how realistic goals are when you start planning the idea. We also learned to look at planning from a more holistic viewpoint that emphasises how all parts of the project will work together, eg. integrating the front with the back end.
What's next for trendTech
As we become more experienced, we definitely see more potential in trendTech. This would include incorporating some of the ideas we didn't get to during the hackathon due to technical and time constraints, such as a live News feed, small forum communities to enable discussion, more TA metrics, and giving specific examples within each graph for indicators of those metrics.
Note: to run the website, go to /debug
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