YourASX

Inspiration

I thought that investing was easy, buy low and sell high, but that's what led me to losing over 3k in high school. I was reluctant to keep up with the news and was too lost in the sea of information that was out there. I did not take my time to read about what I was investing in and what specific events were happening around it. This financial illiteracy is often the road block for many people beginning to invest, the barrier entry is confusing and there are millions of possible things to read about. That was the inspiration for creating the YourASX newsletter.

What it does

YourASX is a daily newsletter that provides a snippet of what is happening within the financial world with Australia, more specifically the Australian ASX. The newsletter for simplicity is divided into two sections, the first section is news articles that just represent general changes in the market, whilst the other section focuses on news about specific companies within the ASX 100. Additionally we have decided to place an emphasis on ESG investing, by scraping news articles on companies with higher ESG scores. Our main goal was to reduce the amount of choices the reader needs to make, thus our articles are summarized and in a simple linear layout to read.

How we built it

As a prototype we are currently using some public APIs such as News API and the OpenAI API, to handle the collection of news articles and to summarize the articles. There are two components to our solution: the news collection and summary that happens in the backend and then there is the physical website that holds the information and that readers will interact with. We use web scraping to find the latest companies within the ASX and also use web scraping to find their ESG scores. Once their scores are found, they are sorted and we search the web for articles relating to the company, then they are summarized and sent to the website to be updated.

Challenges we ran into

On the technical side, most of the challenge was figuring out how to collect the data, first was figuring out what companies that are within the ASX 100, we did not want to hard code them as they could change over time, furthermore finding a source to find the ESG scores of the companies was another challenge. Making the article collector was a difficulty as well, as filtering relevant articles from reliable sources was also difficult. On the organizational side, our communication was often lacking in depth and specificity, which led to deadlines not being fulfilled and getting pushed back. Moving forward, being more deliberate with communication will definitely improve the workflow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are rather proud of how we were able to utilize existing API to give us a better jump start at the problem, rather than needing to build up everything from scratch. We firmly believe that our product provides a useful service that many will find themselves needing or wanting a similar version of.

What we learned

For most of us, this was our first time doing something like this, it has taught us the many key components of creating a startup, from how to form the idea to also how to pitch the startup. This project has pushed all of us outside of our comfort zones, teaching us new skills and new ways of solving a problem.

What's next for YourASX

We are looking at expanding our market reach, so that means going into the tech market, we are looking at different countries, regions.

We are also looking forward to other methods of filtering our articles through sentimental analysis. This is so we can garner analysis and determine what is positive, negative and neutral, that being good, bad for market picks.