We were inspired by apps and tools that try to gamify normally mundane personal finance tasks such as budgeting and credit score improvement and want to bring that idea to stock trading in a risk-free way. Furthermore, we believe that simulated stock trading is even more fun with friends, so we brought some social networking and competition ideas to our project.
Stock Prodigy is much more than just a trading simulator; it's an opportunity to learn about how to trade stocks while participating in fun and engaging challenges and competing with friends and family. You can learn about the fundamentals of picking good stocks and see how your decisions play out in real time. Stock Prodigy also has a rewards system designed to build good trading habits, such as always doing due diligence and holding for the long term!
Stock Prodigy is built on a fairly simple tech stack of a React frontend and a Firebase backend handling authentication and storage. Styling was done using react-bootstrap and a few Mantine components. Stock information is pulled using the alphavantage API.
One of our biggest challenges was figuring out how to manage the many states an app like this has, such as authentication and other user information. We are still new to web development, so much of the development process was trial and error in seeing what worked and what didn't.
We are most proud of the social aspects of Stock Prodigy. Trading simulators have been done plenty before, but we believe integrating social and educational aspects into such a product is a very unique solution.
The importance of good planning! Through the trial and error process of building Stock Prodigy, we ended up with a fairly messy codebase at the end which slowed us down some. While small part of this was almost certainly inescapable, good planning from the start would have helped to minimize these largely avoidable problems.
We would like to expand on the social features by offering group challenges with interesting prompts, such as seeing who can navigate a simulated recession the best, and enabling more profile customizability. Furthermore, we would like to extend the features of the trading simulator to include more features such as options and dividends. Since this app was only built in 24 hours, lots of bug squashing is also in order.