## Inspiration

Politicians make a lot of money. Like, a lot. After a thorough analysis of how politicians apply their skill sets to faithfully "serve the general public", we realized that there's a hidden skill that many of them possess. It is a skill that hasn't been in the spotlight for some time. It is the skill which allowed US senator, Richard Burr, to sell 95% of his holdings in his retirement account just before a downturn in the market (thus avoiding $80,000 in losses and generating a profit upwards of $100k). This same skill allowed several senators like Spencer Bachus who had access to top secret meetings discussing the 2008 stock market crash and it's inevitably to heavily short the market just before the crash, generating a 200% per 1% drop in the NASDAQ. So, we decided that... senators know best! Our project is about outsider trading, which essentially means an outsider (you) get to trade! It allows you to track and copy the live trades of whatever politician you like.

## Why the idea works and what problem is solves

We have a term called "recognition by ignition", a simple set of words that describe how this unconventional approach works. Our system has the ability to, by virtue of the data that is available to it, prioritize the activity of Senators previously engaged in suspicious trading activities. When these Senators make a big move, everyone following them receives a message via our InfoBip integration, and knows, temporarily acting as a catalyst for changes in the value of that stock, at best just enough to draw the scrutiny of financial institutions, essentially serving as an extra layer of safety checks while consistently being a trustworthy platform to trade on, ensured by wallet management and transactions through Circle integration.

## What it does

Outsider trading gets the trading data of a large set of politicians, showing you their trading history and allowing you to select one or more politicians to follow. After depositing an amount into outsider trading, our tool either lets you manually assess the presented data and invest wherever you want, or automatically follow the actions of the politicians that you have followed. Sp. when they invest in stock x, our tools proportionally invest for you in the same stock. When they pull out of stock y, your bot will pull out of that stock too! This latter feature can be simulated or followed through with actual funds to track the portfolio performance of a certain senator.

## How we built it

We built our web app using ReactJS for the front end connected to a snappy Node.js backend, and a MySQL server hosted on RDS. Thanks in part to the STOCK act of 2012, most trading data for US senators has to be made public information, so we used the BeautifulSoup library to Web Scrape and collect our data.

## Challenges we ran into

Naturally, 36 hours (realistically less) of coding, would involve tense sessions of figuring out how to do certain things. We saw the direct value that the services offered by InfoBip and Circle could have on our project so we got to work implementing that and as expected had to traverse a learning curve with implementing the APIs, this job was however made easier because of the presence of mentors and good documentation online that allowed us to integrate an SMS notification system and a system that sets up crypto wallets for any user that signs up.
Collaborating effectively is one of the most important parts of a hackathon, so we as a team learnt a lot more about effective and efficient version control measures and how to communicate and divide roles and work in a software focused development environment.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* A complete front-end for the project was finished in due time
* A fully functional back-end and database system to support our front-end
* InfoBip integration to set up effective communication with the customer. Our web-app automatically sends an SMS when a senator you are following makes a trade.
* Crypto wallets for payment, implemented with Circle!
* A well designed and effective database hosted on an RDS instance

## What we learned

While working on this project we had to push ourselves outside of all of our comfort zones. Going into this project none of us knew how to web scrape, set up crypto wallets, create SMS/email notification systems, or work with RDS instances. Although some of these features may be bare bones, we are leaving this project with new knowledge and confidence in these areas. We learnt how to effectively work and scale a full stack web-app, and got invaluable experience on how to collaborate and version control as a team.

## What's next for Outsider Trading

This is only the beginning for us, there's a lot more to come!

* Increased InfoBip integration with features like:
1) Weekly summary email of your portfolio (We have investment data and financial data on Circle that can simply be summarized with the API we use to make charts on the portfolio page and then attach that through Infobip through the email.
2) SMS 2.0 features can be used to directly allow the user to invest from their messaging app of choice
* Improved statistical summaries of your own trades and those of each senator with models trained on trading datasets that can detect the likelihood of foul play in the market.
* Zapier integration with InfoBip to post updates about senator trades regularly to a live Twitter (X) page.
* An iOS and android native app, featuring all of our current features an more.
## Inspiration

We constantly have friends asking us for advice for investing, or ask for investing advice ourselves. We realized how easy a platform that allowed people to make collaboratively make investments would make sharing information between people. We formed this project out of inspiration to solve a problem in our own lives.

The word 'Omada' means group in Greek, and we thought it sounded official and got our message across.

## What it does

Our platform allows you to form groups with other people, put your money in a pool, and decide which stocks the group should buy. We use a unanimous voting system to make sure that everyone who has money involved agrees to the investments being made.

We also allow for searching up stocks and their graphs, as well as individual portfolio analysis.

The way that the buying and selling of stocks actually works is as follows: let's say a group has two members, A and B. If A has $75 on the app, and person B has $25 on the app, and they agree to buy a stock costing $100. When they sell the stock, person A gets 75% of the revenue from selling the stock and person B gets 25%.

Person A: $75
Person B: $25
Buy stock for $100
Stock increases to $200
Sell Stock
Person A: $150
Person B: $200

We use a proposal system in order to buy stocks. One person finds a stock that they want to buy with the group, and makes a proposal for the type of order, the amount, and the price they want to buy the stock at. The proposal then goes up for a vote. If everyone agrees to purchasing the stock, then the order is sent to the market. The same process occurs for selling a stock.

## How we built it

We built the webapp using Flask, specifically to handle routing and so that we could use python for the backend. We used BlackRock for the charts, and NASDAQ for live updates of charts. Additionally, we used mLab with MongoDB and Azure for our databases, and Azure for cloud hosting. Our frontend is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

## Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time initially with routing the app using Flask, as this was our first time using it. Additionally, Blackrock has an insane amount of data, so getting that organized and figuring out what we wanted to do with that and processing it was challenging, but also really fun.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that we got the service working as much as we did! We decided to take on a huge project, which could realistically take months of time to make if this was a workplace, but we got a lot of features implemented and plan on continuing to work on the project as time moves forward. None of us had ever used Flask, MongoDB, Azure, BlackRock, or Nasdaq before this, so it was really cool getting everything together and working the way it does.

## What's next for Omada

We hope to polish everything off, add features we didn't have time to implement, and start using it for ourselves! If we are able to make it work, maybe even publishing it!
## Inspiration

Students often have a hard time finding complementary co-founders for their ventures/ideas and have limited interaction with students from other universities. Many universities don't even have entrepreneurship centers to help facilitate the matching of co-founders. Furthermore, it is hard to seek validation from a wide range of perspectives on your ideas when you're immediate network is just your university peers.

## What it does

VenYard is a gamified platform that keeps users engaged and interested in entrepreneurship while building a community where students can search for co-founders across the world based on complementary skill sets and personas. VenYard’s collaboration features also extend to the ideation process feature where students can seek feedback and validation on their ideas from students beyond their university. We want to give the same access to entrepreneurship and venture building to every student across the world so they can have the tools and support to change the world.

## How we built it

We built VenYard using JS, HTML, CSS, Node.js, MySQL, and a lack of sleep!

## Challenges we ran into

We had several database-related issues related to the project submission page and the chat feature on each project dashboard. Furthermore, when clicking on a participant on a project's dashboard, we wanted their profile to be brought up but we ran into database issues there but that is the first problem we hope to fix.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

For a pair of programmers who have horrible taste in design, we are proud of how this project turned out visually. We are also proud of how we have reached a point in our programming abilities where we are able to turn our ideas into reality!

## What we learned

We were able to advance our knowledge of MySql and Javascript specifically. Aside from that, we were also able to practice pair programming by using the LiveShare extension on VSCode.

## What's next for VenYard

We hope to expand the "Matching" feature by making it so that users can specify more criteria for what they want in the ideal co-founder. Additionally, we probably would have to take a look at the UI and make sure it's user-friendly because there are a few aspects that are still a little clunky. Lastly, the profile search feature needs to be redone because our initial idea of combining search and matching profiles doesn't make sense.

## User Credentials if you do not want to create an account

username: [revantkantamneni@gmail.com](mailto:revantkantamneni@gmail.com)
password: revant

## Submission Category

Education and Social Good

## Discord Name

revantk16#6733, nicholas#2124