New Tradr

A fun and informative web app that introduces new investors to their first stock buy, which is recommended based on the user's answers to questions around risk and personal interests.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the BlackRock challenge to make an app that addresses the financial wellbeing of a particular demographic. We focused on non-investors ages 16 to 25 and tried to resolve the following hesitations around investing:

Lack of knowledge

Risk aversion

No personal interest

In short, a lot of young people don't see themselves as the "investor" type, either because the barrier to entry seems too daunting or because the perceived investor persona does not feel like themselves. Our app aims to fix this, as investing is a habit best learned early!

What it does

Our web app consists of a fun, simple survey that asks the user a few questions about their habits and personality, alongside their interests and investment goals. These questions are based on demonstrated research linking certain areas of behavior, such as driving and socialization, to risk appetite. Each user is assigned a number corresponding to their level of risk appetite, which is subsequently used along with their interests to find three companies from the S&P 500 that the user may be interested in buying for a first stock pick. These companies are selected on the basis of quantitative factors affecting risk and price expectations (moving averages, volatility, market cap) as well as qualitative factors around what each company does and how it's related to the user's interests.

For example: the user says that they would like to invest $1,000. A subsequent question asks the user if they would bet 10% of that amount on a fair coin flip. Most people are risk averse and would walk away from such an offer, but if the user says that they would take the bet, then their answer will be weighted toward an aggressive risk appetite profile.

More at https://www.newtradr.com/#/about

How we built it

We built the app from scratch in React.js and the financial database in JSON using the Google Finance API. The website is hosted by Netlify and the domain is owned by our team.

Challenges we ran into

We had to scale back the intention of the project during the Hack. We had wanted to incorporate spending data as well via a Plaid integration and show the user more charts and information at the end of the survey, but we ran into time restraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of building such a user-friendly application from start-to-finish and making it publicly available on the web. This tool really works and can get young people into investing!

What we learned

We learned a lot about Google Finance API, as well as quantitative risk signals such as stochastic oscillators and volatility indexes. In researching the target user demographic, we also learned a lot about how risk is correlated with different behavioral traits.

What's next for New Tradr

We hope to keep building on this idea to arrive at a more sophisticated tool that can take in even more information about a user to give even more personalized investment recommendations. We believe that such a tool could serve as a compliment to existing trading platforms like Robinhood or Groww, and hope to get in touch with individuals from the FinTech industry about how to scale New Tradr!

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