SectorSavvy

Most of us weren't paying attention to the stock market growing up, and we missed some important events. Sector Savvy is a tool to help young people learn about portfolios in historical markets.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by finance tools like Yahoo Finance and the Bloomberg Terminal.

What it does

As young college students interested in finance, we realize that we weren't paying attention to many of the historical market events that happened earlier in our lives. We built a tool to aggregate information from past markets to fill in this knowledge gap. Users can see past macro-economic indicators, relevant headlines, and other data from up to 20 years ago. The tool breaks down important events into the effect on their sector -- hence the name :)

How we built it

  • Prototyping in Sigma
  • React Front-end
  • Next Back-end
  • Data preparation using Python
  • Data visualization using ApexCharts
  • Version control in GitHub

Challenges we ran into

The first major challenge was finding reliable data to capture the essence of historical markets. We settled on gathering data from sector-ETF's to represent the broader market. On top of past pricing data, we also searched for the most relevant news headlines to mark milestone cultural events.

Visualizing our data required involved using a 3rd party library called Apex Charts. The documentation for this library is sparse, so we it took lots of troubleshooting to achieve the end behavior.

To connect our components, we used the Next.js/React component hierarchy. Our visualization tools gather from the same user inputs, so they must update each other in real time. This turns out to be an extremely non trivial problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Aggregating real world data
  • Developing a large full-stack app
  • Deploying our project globally
  • Connecting with users
  • Finishing phase 1 MVP

What we learned

This project first lead us to the world of finance. Our team actually walked to the business school and pitched our idea on multiple business students to get feedback from our target demographic. We took away recommendations to improve our headlines feature and overall UX design.

From a technical perspective, we carried the project from conception to deployment. The major focal point was working with Javascript to implement our front-end. Our team mostly specializes in Data Science, so this project was a stretch for all of us!

What's next for SectorSavvy

Here's a list of upgrades that would take our project to the next level:

  • Integrate with a database for more efficient storage and retrieval of data
  • Provide more depth into economic indicators (interest rates, sentiment, etc...)
  • Expand FAQ, resources and about pages
  • Link to more articles and cover more ground
  • Increase gamification such as scores and feedback

Thank you for checking out our project!!

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