Stock Facilitator

As you all know interest rates are very low at the moment. And it seems to stay as it is for a while. Officially, inflation is currently not existent in the EU. However, (not only) I have the feeling that in our every day lives prices do increase. In fact the central and national banks are lowering the value of our money by flooding the financial markets with more and more loans for almost bankrupt countries (comming from nowhere!).

So what would be a good approach to overcome this period of low interest rates? To be honest: I don't really know. I started trading in the middle of this year. I am hoping for some yield return that would equal the inofficial inflation. Meanwhile I made some experiences. Sure, there are lots of opportunities to build a fortune, but there is also the risk of losing money. However, all the necessary information is out there but hard to comprehend. There are simply so much aspects you have to keep an eye on. Wouldn't it be nice if we could simply define some rules based on all that information and get a couple of proposals which really make sense? That's it - the idea for my implementation project: I will build a stocks application called "Stock Facilitator".

Vision/Core requirements

For a start I have formulated two core requirements (using the SOPHIST method I tried to make it as precise as possible at this time: https://www.sophist.de/en/analysis/):

REQ-1: When I look for shares to invest in, the web application has to propose the top 10 shares based on the current stock prices and further statistical data*.
REQ-2: When I select one of the proposed shares, the web application has to give me an overview of all relevant information*.

* needs to be specified further

Besides the functional requirements named above, there is a non-functional requirement from a technical perspective:

NF-REQ1: The application shall be able to run in local on-premise as well as in a cloud environment.

Further requirements will be defined and implemented on the go. I'm following kind of an agile approach here. ;)

Roadmap

You will always find the most recent version of the application here: http://stock-facilitator.mybluemix.net/

However, rome was'nt built in a day and as you can imagine such a software project will take a couple of incremental steps. So, i was planning for the following high-level roadmap (which is always subject to change):

Prerequisites

In order to follow the articles regarding this project you should have already some expertise in the following topics:

• Java EE 8: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaee/overview/index.html 
• Spring Framework 4.0: https://spring.io
• Maven 3: https://maven.apache.org/guides/index.html

I will outline the important parts and the things that took me a while to understand but I won't go into details about the basic concepts of the mentioned technologies.

Furthermore I will make use of the following tools which is why some additional knowledge might be beneficial (optional):

• SpringSource Tool Suite (IDE): https://spring.io/tools/sts
• GIT: https://git-scm.com/doc
• IBM Bluemix: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/docs
• Camunda Modeler: https://camunda.org/download/modeler
• draw.io: https://www.draw.io/
• Google Chrome/Firefox/IE (any modern browser is just fine)

Blog entries

Have a look at the following articles describing how to implement the "Stock Facilitator":