Fintasy

Initial player statistics
Game Results
After Game Statistics

Inspiration

As enthusiasts looking to dive into the world of trading, we quickly realized how daunting it can be for newcomers to get started. Our original idea was to build a collaborative social media-style app where users could share their trades and strategies. However, we soon recognized that this would be challenging to implement and could raise significant ethical concerns, limiting personal freedom to make choices. So, we decided to pivot and keep the fun aspect of trading alive by drawing inspiration from fantasy football. We asked ourselves, "Why not combine the thrill of trading with the excitement of a fantasy league?" And that's how our app idea was born.

What it does

Our app allows users to create or join trading leagues with a fixed weekly budget. Each week, the app generates matchups between users based on their virtual trades. The winner is determined by who achieves the highest return on investment, and the app automatically tracks the stats, such as total net gains or losses for each user. It's like fantasy football, but for trading!

How we built it

To bring our idea to life, we used the Flask framework in Python to handle the backend, with a frontend built using HTML, TypeScript, and CSS for styling. The logic for generating matchups, calculating stats, and tracking profits was done using various API endpoints. We also used a SQL database to store league data and player statistics, ensuring everything ran smoothly.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we used Next.js and React to build the app, but with everyone continuously editing and making changes, the project quickly became disorganized. This made debugging and troubleshooting very difficult. To overcome this, we integrated Flask and utilized GitHub for version control, which helped keep our codebase organized and made collaboration much smoother.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this was our first hackathon, we’re incredibly proud of what we accomplished. Despite being newcomers, we successfully developed an app that we are proud to use ourselves. The experience taught us a lot about teamwork, problem-solving, and building something from the ground up in a short amount of time. We took an idea and brought it to life, creating a functional, beginner-friendly app that makes stock trading fun and accessible. Seeing our hard work come together and knowing that we created something useful and engaging is a huge achievement for us.

What we learned

Through developing Fintasy, we learned the importance of staying organized and thinking through decisions carefully. Initially, we jumped into development without fully refining our ideas, leading to wasted time on features we later scrapped. This experience taught us the value of proper planning and understanding the project scope before implementation. It reinforced the importance of aligning every decision with the overall vision to avoid unnecessary work and stay focused on building a product that truly meets our goals.

What's next for Fintasy

Looking ahead, we plan to further develop Fintasy by integrating real-time stock market data, allowing users to make live trades and compete with friends based on actual market movements. Also, we plan on implementing more customizing features, like specific league structures. Additionally, we want to work on the networking side of the app, allowing users to chat with one another. We’re excited to continue improving the app and adding new features to enhance the learning process and create a more immersive, competitive environment.