Main Project Phase 1: Financial/ESG/Social Hype Dashboard

Goal:

  • To create a dashboard that can be used to judge a stocks financial performance, ESG , and social media hype.

Methods:

  • Financial: The standard slew of traditional financial measurements and KPI’s such as EPS, P/E, operating income, assets, debts, Beta, etc. Most of these will be summed up with the Piotroski F Score (1-9). These were used to see if the company is doing well financially and how viable of an investment it is. In addition, if possible, I would like to eventually build in more active trading indicators such as 50day vs 200 day moving average crossing events, MACD, and RSI.

  • ESG: On the dashboard, there a couple of indicators that will show if the company has set any climate targets in order to do their part, the environmental impact of the products life cycle, how waste is managed, and how transparent the company was with information. Companies that have profited the most off of environmentally or socially damaging products will be graded much harder. Companies that have a large market cap are also expected to do more and will be graded harder as well. While this mainly measured environmental impact, I hope to eventually add metrics for how well the company treats its employees and how positive or negative they have been to society. Essentially this is the moral metric

  • Social Media Hype: This metric was for active trading support in order to see where retail traders are concentrating most of their attention. The indicators gathered their data from web-scraping Reddit posts, Twitter, and search results from search engines+Youtube. The pandemic has shown that retail investors can influence a stock’s price despite being relatively few in volume.

Obstacles:

  • Financial: I have no formal training or education in Finance, so I have been learning it as I go. I have tried to include the most relevant and widely agreed upon metrics that (should) matter. It was also very hard finding some of this information because there were many paywalls to get through, programming and incorporating API’s, or financial documents to sift through.
  • ESG: It is extremely hard to find information about this because the companies themselves either don’t track these numbers or if they do, it is kept from the public. If it is released to the public, there is a question of if an outside source could verify the companies’ claims.
  • Social Media Hype: The biggest issue about social media is the raw amount of data that is out there and that get generated on a daily basis. Because there are relatively little services out there that measure a stocks hype, this was a blind toss to see if it will be a useful metric. The raw amount of processing and scraping that is required makes this the most involved and programming heavy category. There will eventually be an issue of storing all the data.

Main Project Phase 2: Survey

Goal:

  • Find out if the dashboard with ESG information influences individuals in how they invest or what products they buy.

Methods:

  • Survey: The survey took roughly 10 minutes to fill out. The participant were asked to take an initial survey to gauge their demographics, interest in ESG investing, and knowledge. Then they will explore the dashboard for a bit before taking the exit survey where they were asked if they think the dashboard has influenced them to choose certain companies over others, if they found the dashboard useful, and if it’s a feature that they would like to be updated on. There will then be a link where they can subscribe to an emails newsletter
  • Participants: The individuals chosen for the project were sourced from friends primarily and then asking if they could recommend one other individual. After reaching out to friends and their plus 1s, I emailed my undergraduate professors to see if any of them are interested in participating or if they could include the link on department email. in the future, I plan on posting the survey on Reddit in order to try to land a couple more responses, but this will most likely increase the rate of troll/bad-faith responses.
  • Analysis:The survey was then exported from google survey, cleaned, and displayed to see if there is any strong interest or momentum.

Project 2: Google Trends analysis + search engine & Youtube results

  • This project was based around keyword searches in google trends in order to determine the search result trends. This was then coupled with the raw amount of search result numbers that appear when the word is searched. Bing, Google, Yahoo, and Baidu were searched and compared as well as youtube, netflix, and reddit in order to determine how much content is out there for these topics. These numbers were then compared.

Project 3 : Google Data Analyst Capstone Project

  • In this case study, I performed data analysis for a fictional bike-share company in order to help them attract more riders. The director of marketing believes the company’s future success depends on maximizing the number of annual memberships. The question that I was tasked with was finding the difference between casual and members. The data was prepared by Google.