2024-07-31 18:18:07 -05:00
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# Stock trading bot
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During my senior year of high school, my economics class had a
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competition where we traded stocks on a fake online exchange.
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I wrote a Python shell script which could make purchasing decisions
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for me, and submit them to the website. It uses Beautiful Soup to
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log in to the virtual exchange with my details, and to collect
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stock information from sources like Yahoo Finance. When given a
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budget, it chooses a diverse selection of shares which most closely
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approaches the budget without exceeding it.
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## Challenges
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Using web scraping to collect data online is difficult to do performantly
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and robustly. Network errors and slow internet speeds caused the program to
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run very slowly, and changes to page layouts could cause the scraper to
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err. To solve these errors, a script can query several pages in parallel
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and retry on network errors. Caching can also significantly speed things
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up. I chose Yahoo Stocks because its page layout changes very little over
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time, and I use BeautifulSoup, a very robust HTML parser and scraper to
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reliably retrieve data.
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