Milestone: Report - SSW-345-Team-5/Discord-Bot GitHub Wiki

Problem

TrendEase Trading helps to solve the difficulties associated with being a new investor. Prior to this bot's development, multiple different tools and software were required to get an accurate read on the market. Some are free, others are paid and all require separate interfacing. This bot helps to solve this issue by bundling several common stock market analysis features into one free, easy-to-use and mobile platform. While this bot does not posses the advanced analysis and computational power present in higher-tier tools such as the Bloomberg Terminal, it does have everything that a budding investor needs to succeed.

Primary Features

For a video demonstration of this bot's features, please visit here.

Visualized Real-Time Analysis

TrendEase Trading provides visualizations of stock analysis in an easy-to-read and informative format. Using Python's Pandas and graphing libraries, real-time stock data is queried from the API, graphed and is presented to the user in a manner of seconds. This graph can be saved as one would any other image and either sent to others or archived for personal records. An example of the exdaily command, which analyses a cryptocurrency over a FOREX market, is shown below.

Report Generation

TrendEase Trading offers users a unique way to keep track of their queried data and facilitate easy storage and sharing. The report command suite saves the results of data queries and graphing to a stylized text document, enabling users to save or share data in an easy and professional manner. Currently, stock data and indicator reports can be generated. Additionally, a user can utilize a macro command, preport, to generate a report for every stock in their portfolio at once. An example of the sreport command detailing data on Microsoft is shown below.

Customization

TrendEase Trading grants users the ability to create and manage their own portfolio, allowing them to focus only on stocks that interest them. This portfolio is hosted in a Google Firestore Database, and is persistent across any number of sessions or devices. Users do not need to create an additional account or register a service, as Discord's native authentication system is used to ensure that each user has their own and can only modify their own portfolio. An example of a portfolio interaction is shown below.

Mobility

By being embedded within Discord, TrendEase Trading provides capable and easy access for on-the-go analysis. The entire command suite offered to desktop users is also available to mobile ones. This drastically increases the amount of time that an investor can spend on the market, allowing them to dedicate commuting time, bathroom breaks and in-law visits to getting ahead of the market.

Reflections

The team thoroughly enjoyed working on this project and learned a lot regarding both finance and systems engineering. While the team already knew how to implement all of the technical solutions required by this bot, it never had any experience in linking this many separate systems together to form one overarching feature. Additionally, the team was able to hone their skills with process and project management methods and practices such as GitHub, documentation writing and milestone reporting, abilities which will prove useful in industry work. The primary takeaway from this project is that the team wishes it was a semester-long one instead, as the team feels it was only just beginning to scratch the surface of planned features and what was possible.

Limitations

The only true limitation that the team had for this project was limitations imposed by the free version of the AlphaVantage API. This reduced the effectiveness of bot usage by imposing time-based limitations on usage, and practically disabled the portfolio report generation macro by limiting the portfolio size to one for report generation. The team investigated the possibility of upgrading to a higher API tier, but found the expense to not be worth it in the short term.

Future Work

The team has already begun the next stage of TrendEase Trading's development. Please visit our website for more information. The team will be in contact with Professor Yang shortly once the initial stage of this work has proven to be complete. Additionally, the team would like to thank Professor Yang for an extremely fun and informative project, as well as Herb Zieger for his continuous support throughout the semester.