Grower

Inspiration

The inspiration was from my US GOV teacher from high school who emphasized investing in your future at a young age. He wanted us to put money into ETFs and Index funds as soon as we graduated, and like the smart man I am, I invested in Gamestop and lost almost $2,000. The reason I didn't do index funds or ETFs was that there were too many options and it was too much of a hassle to research about. I know a lot of other college students are in the same boat, and wanted college students to not only focus on their careers while having a program to invest in their retirement at an early age.

What it does

Grower takes all your transactions and automatically rounds them up to the next number. It then takes the sum of all the changes from the round-up at the end of the month, and it buys partial shares of certain stocks. The stocks will follow popular index funds like the Vanguard 500. (VFIAX)

How we built it

We built Grower in Python and its built-in GUI library, Tkinter. We used the Alpha Vantage API along with several Python libraries to get weekly stock information, and also used the matplotlib library to create visuals like pie charts and stock graphs.

Challenges we ran into

Because all of us were somewhat new back-end developers, we had a hard time trying to make a front-end page or connecting the back and front end using Flask. Trying to use Plaid to gain access to a bank account.

We also ran into challenges while using the Alpha Vantage API because of its free plan limitations, and we had to cut down the amount of data we would take from each stock because it stops us from making more than 5 API calls per minute. We decided to take our energy from this limitation and focus on making a simple user interface instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each one of us had no prior knowledge of tkinter's usage, so we learned how to program in it from scratch. In addition, we did not have prior API experience, so learning hands-on with Alpha Vantage's free API gave us a lot of experience that we hope to use in future products.

What we learned

With Grower, we've learned how to use data from APIs in real-world projects and also construct basic graphical user interfaces. We also learned more Python, as two of us had not taken the Python class at UCF. While Python is simple, it's used often for tasks like machine learning and data-driven programming, so we're thrilled that we've gained additional experience with the language. Finally, we gained hands-on experience with Google Cloud and its artificial intelligence tools.

What's next for Grower

When drafting Grower, we had a lot of conversation about the front-end for the user interface. While we ultimately settled on tkinter for its ease of use and interoperability with our existing Python code, we'd love to explore creating a React front-end for the project in the future, seeing as React is in significantly higher demand than tkinter is. We'd also like to explore finding more statistics with the stocks that we've found and would like to see if we can create stock suggestions for the user of the program, based on algorithmic calculations on historical data.

Built With

• alpha-vantage
• python
• tkinter