Valuasion

I was just searching around for other data source to see if there's anything better out there. I came across a website called FinancialModelingPrep.com. The documentation was good. It was really fast. And it was free. I didn't like the idea of having to download a csv file every month and loading it into my database. And I also didn't like to pay $20/mo for data that I could get for free. I'd like to point out that at this point, the owner of QuickFS.net has begun to work on a web api solution, so moving away from QuickFS was more of a monetary reason than a technical one. I once again rewrote the scripts that download the data to work with FinancialModelingPrep. Each time I rewrote the scripts, I tried to make the code cleaner and more reusable.

It took a couple of weeks working on the script on and off, but I'm done at this point and the app has been working great for me.

I've been using the app on and off for a few months now and have demoed it to a couple of friends. They thought it was cool. Feeling guilty that the app looked horrible (but worked great), I told them that I was working on making it pretty. Now that I said that, I had a promise to keep, and a goal to achieve. I set out to design the app using Affinity Designer. I've been using this vector graphic software to do simple mockups of my ideas. I'm now going to use it to design my web app, something that I will be proud to show the world. I worked on the mockups for a couple of days, playing around with the design and revising a lot every day. After I was happy with the design, I set out to create the html pages. This step was the hardest for me because I'm primarily a software developer and only dabbled in web design here and there in the past, but nothing serious. Now that I wanted to build an app and not wanting to hire a designer to build the front end for me, I had to step up my game and learned everything there is to learn about web design. It took me a few days to convert my mockups into html and css, but I did it, and I was proud. I was more in awe that I actually accomplished this. I took a week off to rest after having worked on this on nights and weekends after my day time job.

I knew I wanted to use React JS to build the app. I wanted a single page app that loads the data from my web service which I coded in Python Flask. I forgot to mention that earlier. I didn't know Python or Flask until I started working on this project. I was extremely happy that I got to learn Python because it's becoming a very popular programming language and there's countless uses for language such as data science (which I'm doing), machine learning and AI. So I worked on the app on and off every weekend. It took me an entire month but I got it done. I now need to host it somewhere.

I decided to use Digital Ocean to host my web service. I settled on Netlify to host my React JS app. I already bought a domain for the app and linked it to my Netlify account. The reason why I chose valuasion.com as the domain and product name is to express the purpose of the app. The purpose of the app is to provide a way to value companies. It's an app that does valuation. I wanted to play on word and made it valuasion instead.

I launched the app and took a break.

I wasn't happy with Intrinio because of the data cap. It took too long to get the data I wanted and at this point after I proved to myself that the app will be useful to me, I wanted a more reliable data source. I searched around and found QuickFS.net. They didn't have a web api at this point so I had to manually download the csv data file and use the Python Pandas library to read in the data. The csv file was huge as you could imagine because it had all the financial data of all the publicly traded companies. I had to rewrite all my scripts (which was fun for me because I'm learning Python at this point and this was giving me extra practice). This cost me around $20/mo with an annual subscription contract. The owner of the company was very responsive to all my emails, so I really liked that. I settled on using this as my data source for a while. After I converted all my scripts, I was happy with the minimal viable product that I built. It was meant to be used mainly by me at this point so I didn't care that it looked ugly.

After I downloaded all the data that I needed and crunched the numbers with my scripts, I'm ready to actually build an interface for this data so that it's easily searchable. I didn't want to spend too much time with making the interface pretty at this point because I wanted to see what the bare minimum app will feel like when I use it. I wanted to make sure that the functionality provided by the app is useful. I quickly threw together some html and javascript to read data from my web server and present it as just basic html pages with minimal styling. It was not pretty but it was usable, and useful.

I knew what I wanted to build and I have the math to calculate the fair value of a company once I have the company's financial data. I need to find a place to get all this data so I can crunch the numbers. I started doing research and came across so many different sources for data. I wanted a solution that could easily integrate with my app so I knew it had to be some web api. I settled on using Intrinio. There was free version which was a big plus. The web api was also very well documented. The only drawback was that it had a daily cap of how many web service calls I could make in a day, so based on my calculation it would take about 2 weeks to download all the data from the web api. I was fine with this since I'm only starting off and testing out the idea. So I started writing Python scripts to download the data and upload it to my MongoDB database. It was a straightforward process but just tedious because I had to keep an eye on the progress of my download.

I finished reading Rule 1 Investing and thought "hey, I can build an app that will make investing easier for everyone!" The book was a fantastic read. I never thought I could finish a book so fast in my life. I couldn't put it down because it was so addicting. The knowledge that I was getting from reading the book was just priceless. I finally saw a way out of having a job. I wanted to become an intelligent investor. I knew how to be an intelligent investor after reading the book. The entire recipe, or rules of investing, is provided on a silver platter. I just need to follow the advice given in the book and I'll be able to retire soon.

Learning how to value companies and buying stocks at the right price was something that seemed magical or guess work to me before. Now I know how to do it but the process is tedious and long. It was just number crunching. I wanted a quicker way to do that math so I decided to build an app that automatically do all the math for me. The app will calculate the fair value of a company and advise what is a good price to buy a stock. I also wanted to share this with everyone so I decided to build this as a web app.