Faraday

Faraday is an educational website for financial markets where people can learn about stocks and practice on an online simulator. They can also participate in real-time trading contests as well as on modified or historical data. Faraday allows people from all walks of life to learn and experiment with financial markets, try figuring out strategies on influential days and learn with their friends.

Why Faraday?

Currently, India offers, at best, a 6% return on fixed deposits to the bank, which is hardly able to beat the inflation rate of 4.9%. Considering we never know what is going to happen to the world, one must learn how to take advantage of free market to beat inflation. It is important to note that stock markets effect more people than only the ones actively parttaking in it. Each and every common man, woman and child are effected with ups and downs in the market, since it directly effects the countries, and the world's economy.

We believe that every individual should have the right to education, and in the current world, it is important all of us are educated on how financial markets work. Freedtom to parttake in financial markets cannot be gauranteed by simply making the stock market free for all, since there are numerous sociological reasons why people still do not freely participate in it. Getting into the market poses a high risk to a beginner, and these losses unequally effect the poorer, since it is harder for them to recover from it. Such scenarios have led to a society where stock markets are seen wtih a skeptical eye, and often people would rather not take the risk.

This is what we have worked together to change. We hope to provide a platform to attract beginners and experts, allowing them to participate in challenges and get used to the market's craze. They get to get their hands dirty with virtual money, and they get to learn with their friends! We have tried to eliminate financial and sociological factors which effected people's ability to get education and participate in the stock market, and we hope people are more comfortable wtih stock market as they learn more!

However, Faraday is a lot more than a learning platform, as we ascribe below.

What does Faraday offer?

“What good is it?”
Faraday replied: “What good is a baby?”
Or maybe he said: “Soon you will be able to tax it.”

Faraday's main aim is to provide a real time stock market simulator with virtual money to users. But it doesn't end here. We have a lot more to provide.

Users can start learning modules provided by us to gain further insights into the world of the stock market, from jargon to some common strategies. These modules not only provide high quality notes but also interactive exercises for the user to be able to judge his understanding of the subject.
Simulating only the current market might be a slow learning process and we want to provide the users a wide range of historical scenarios where the market was in dire conditions, for example the 2008 financial crisis, COVID outbreak in March 2019. These will help the user analyze their strategies in the extreme cases also and make necessary modifications to the same. Specific contests can also be designed to get the most out of such such scenarios and historical data.
Spending time by just trading with virtual money might become boring. So we also let the users compete against each other by offering live contests, where there is only one objective: make a HELL lot of money. The leaderboards in these contests will drive the participants to continuously work harder in building more profitable strategies and spice up their learning process.
We further intend to utilize the platform and its active users into creating a community where users can choose to discuss their strategies, ideas and failures on a dedicated forum.
We don't want our users to have to manually punch trades everytime by opening the browser, especially the eager programmers who are always looking for ways to automate stuff. For this we also provide the programmers with an API access. What would the API offer them :
- Access to real time data
- Order placement
- User's statistics like their current cash, holdings etc.
This automation means that users can now program their strategies. This feature would be very beneficial given the large amount of people that are now turning towards algorithmic trading.

A potential add-on to this can be SDK's in the most used programming languages like Python, Javascript, Go etc.

Implementation

There are two major use cases that we provide. The first one is the stock trading simulator while the second one involves the learning modules.

First, we will shed light on what we plan to do with the Trading Simulator. There are multiple contests that will be running at any point of time, these can be either live or based on certain historical scenarios. A user can register himself in any on these contests if he chooses to participate.
Upon registration, the user receives 100,000 credits (equivalent to one lakh rupees) which they can use only for this contest. Then they are displayed a collection of stocks which this contest allows you to trade in. The user can now view the charts of any of these stocks. They can now start trading by placing orders against any stock and grow their portfolio.

As the user's returns start increasing, they also start climbing the leaderboard, hence instilling confidence in the user to start trading in the real markets and also at the same time alerting the poor performers to stay away from the real markets as their strategies are not profitable
Finally, we have Learning Modules which are aimed to make the complete beginners less intimidated by the pool of jargon that the financial world uses. We plan to structure the content in such a way that can cater to even the non financial background people. The modules not only contain just plain notes but are also to be equipped with interactive exercises for the users.
The realm of Learning Modules do not end with just exploring finance. We also plan on providing elaborate reading and interactive content for the several mathematical and algorithmic domains which serve as the very backbone of Financial Engineering.

Technologies Used

Python 3, JavaScript
Frameworks Used: Flask, MongoDB, React
Google Cloud for hosting the bot on a virtual machine

Basic Working Version

In this hackathon which lasted only for 24 hours, we have accomplished the below! This version supports: