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Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

cashgraphs.com

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Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#11

Post by justinluther »

mNovak wrote: post #9

Looks nice, but I'm confused how to read the Expected Returns y-axis. My assumption would be that's an annualized ROI, but it's displaying for instance that US Stocks return 0.7% ? Also no idea if Risk has any objective unit? Running the 6 asset classic, it is slightly amusing that the result is essentially just a classic 70-30 stock/bond mix (risk dependent obviously), and the other 4 assets are Would be nice if you…

Thanks for your feedback! This is on my to-do list of things to fix-- some of the flavors have been developed using monthly returns and some use annual. In both cases the x axis is variance of the periodic returns. Also in some cases the returns are log returns which is also a todo. I will fix it so that the x axis is labeled with the user's choice of risk metric used by the optimizer. Also, I should have mentioned it, but the risk choice isn't implemented in the backend yet so the risk metric choice just defaults to variance for right now.

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#13

Post by justinluther »

1autodev wrote: post #8

Idea to make it more user friendly to folks like myself who don't understand how your app is supposed to work: Provide a UI layer which contains some instructions and points out features and their uses. Looking at the app, I don't quite know what I am supposed to do, or use it to figure out. Perhaps provide some example use cases or personas, alongside the UI layer of instructions.

Thanks for the suggestion! Right now I have attempted to do what you are describing, but the user has to click OK on the initial "welcome" dialog box to get stepped through the tour. If you click outside of the box to close it, you skip the tour. Definitely something to improve.

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#14

Post by cudgy »

justinluther wrote: post #13
1autodev wrote: post #8

Idea to make it more user friendly to folks like myself who don't understand how your app is supposed to work: Provide a UI layer which contains some instructions and points out features and their uses. Looking at the app, I don't quite know what I am supposed to do, or use it to figure out. Perhaps provide some example use cases or personas, alongside the UI layer of instructions.

Thanks for the suggestion! Right now I have attempted to do what you are describing, but the user has to click OK on the initial "welcome" dialog box to get stepped through the tour. If you click outside of the box to close it, you skip the tour. Definitely something to improve.

On mobile, the instructions when first loading block the screen, making it more difficult to follow. Maybe a simple, quick video showing a few scenarios would be easier to follow?

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#15

Post by justinluther »

cudgy wrote: post #14
justinluther wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestion! Right now I have attempted to do what you are describing, but the user has to click OK on the initial "welcome" dialog box to get stepped through the tour. If you click outside of the box to close it, you skip the tour. Definitely something to improve.

On mobile, the instructions when first loading block the screen, making it more difficult to follow. Maybe a simple, quick video showing a few scenarios would be easier to follow?

I agree! A video could definitely help, and I will try to change the display of the instructions on small screens.

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#16

Post by thelamest »

Like the idea and execution a lot! Being IANAF, I like to refer people to chapters 4–7 of this lecture from Robert Shiller’s “Financial Markets” Yale course: https://youtu.be/_B_24GUWdSM?t=1269 (~40 minutes). The concept gives a solid insight into why and (broadly) how to diversify. With your work, a very minor note is that the chartjs pie chart always fully redraws for me from the 12 o’clock position on risk preference changes, which makes visual comparisons minimally more difficult. It’s purely cosmetic, because the table communicates this much better anyway, but maybe it’s an easy fix.

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#17

Post by justinluther »

thelamest wrote: post #16

Like the idea and execution a lot! Being IANAF, I like to refer people to chapters 4–7 of this lecture from Robert Shiller’s “Financial Markets” Yale course: https://youtu.be/_B_24GUWdSM?t=1269 (~40 minutes). The concept gives a solid insight into why and (broadly) how to diversify. With your work, a very minor note is that the chartjs pie chart always fully redraws for me from the 12 o’clock position on risk prefere…

Thanks! I've also noticed that the pie chart re-rendering is quite busy and visually distracting. But javascript is by far my weakest layer in the whole stack so I've struggled to fiddle with it without breaking it :)

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#18

Post by santa_boy »

justinluther wrote: post #12
readme wrote: post #10

please keep working on this i suspect it's not going to be free for very long if it remains open source there's something no other fintech app has

Thanks very much for the kind words!

Just curious to play around ... is the Lambda function on github too?

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#19

Post by divbzero »

> I am still working out kinks in the backend, particularly cold-start issues because the Lambda function has to load the entire Torch library (~2GB). This occasionally causes the AWS API Gateway to reach max timeout before the Lambda function finishes.

I could not find your backend code to confirm, but I suspect you could convert that Lambda function into a long-running app to avoid cold-start issues. This could be deployed with an app engine (e.g. Heroku, Google App Engine, AWS Elastic Beanstalk), as a Docker container (e.g. AWS EKS), or directly on a server (e.g. AWS EC2). Feel free to contact me via my profile, happy to point you in the right direction.

Re: Show HN: CashGraphs – A securities portfolio optimizer

#20

Post by justinluther »

santa_boy wrote: post #18
justinluther wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks very much for the kind words!

Just curious to play around ... is the Lambda function on github too?

I'm keeping it private for now but might open it up in the future. Thanks!
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