Provident

Inspiration

With the increasing number of companies and investing opportunities becoming available across the board, the world becomes more financially complex. Without adequate resources to support younger and newer investors there is an ever-increasing gap in financial literacy. Minimal financial education in school, lower purchasing power and lack of security, youth have trouble gaining valuable experience with the markets. We realized the value of this project after we were swept up in the reddit roller coaster and one of us naively invested real money in volatile stocks without being fully aware of the consequences. He emerged quite the wiser, but a fair bit poorer. This was the spark behind Provident, a financial literacy tool, built by youth, for youth. Years of experience competing at competitive business events and training younger members, we know the importance of financial literacy.

What it does

Provident provides easy access to various stocks and news. Our filters and search engines allow for more targeted viewing. A simple interface to which many resources will be added helps adjust new users. Provident’s key service is our Stock Market Simulator and Portfolio. Users are given (fake) money to spend on whichever stocks they choose, allowing them to track their earnings as well as sell their holdings and net worth in their personalized portfolios.

How we built it

Provident is built with Javascript, HTML, and CSS. Stock data is drawn from IEX Cloud APIs, with highcharts being used to visualize the data. The first thing we did was look for an API, and learn how to request data from it. Libraries and modules like Tailwind CSS and Highcharts allowed us to make a smooth and interactive UI. Using Node.js and its built-in libraries our website is able to serve files from a web-server. After individually working on components such as News, Stocks and UI design, we banded together to tackle the simulator.

Challenges we ran into

Our greatest challenge was putting together our knowledge and applying our learnings to such a project in such a small amount of time. We had to learn about the new libraries and unfamiliar language of JavaScript. The untrodden road that lay ahead of us because of our lack of experience made the hackathon more challenging, but also more fruitful. Half our team was new to hackathons and had to learn Javascript and web development, within the span of 18 hours, which we are immensely proud of. The first coding challenge was figuring out how to fetch from the API with Javascript, which took the rest of the first evening. Making the request and seeing the information in the console was a triumphant first hurrah for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Apart from learning a new programming language, we learned a lot about GitHub repositories and coding as a team. On a different note, we learned a lot about planning ahead, setting goals, managing our time, and finally, controlling our expectations.

What we learned

We really spiraled out of control with ideas for Provident, but we look forward to continuing the project after Hack The 6ix. We want to expand the simulator and make it more intuitive, create help pages and educational financial information, as well as making more diverse and helpful graphs. The project concluded with us happy to have worked with each other, finding ways to support each other to achieve our goals and collaborating as a team to face our obstacles head on. We are grateful for having participated in HT6 and our courage to embrace our fears and come out with our heads held high. We weren’t sure how we would do it, but by sticking through it and making sure to invest our time and energies wisely, we figured out how to make an amazing project that we all look forward to working on.

What's next for Provident

The website should be accessible to all. Students and youngsters should be able to save their progress, learn more about the world of finance. Our goal is to make the seemingly incomprehensible world of finance easily accessible at the fingertips of all. We will be adding resources and lessons that explain the core concepts to broaden the horizons of interested youth. Eventually we want Provident to be the go-to site for learning anything and experiencing anything business or finance related!

Built With

• css
• highcharts
• html
• iexcloud
• javascript
• node.js
• tailwindcss
• webstorm