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 will be 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 build in more active trading indicators such as 50day vs 200 day moving average crossing events, MACD, and RSI.
- ESG: On the dashboard, this will be 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 will mainly measure environmental impact, there will also be 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 is 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 will take roughly 10 minutes to fill out. The participant will be 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 will be 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 will be sourced from friends primarily and then asking if they could recommend one other individual. After reaching out to friends and their plus 1, I will email my professors to see if any of them are interested in participating or if they could include the link on department email. I will also post 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 will then be exported from google survey, cleaned, and displayed to see if there is any strong interest or momentum. This will then be coupled with the second project that I am conducting in order to see if there is any increasing interest in environmental.
Project 2: Google Trends analysis + search engine & Youtube results
In theory, this project will be much easier than the other. This one is based around keyword searches in google trends in order to determine the search result trends. This will then be coupled with the raw amount of search result numbers that appear when the word is searched. Bing, Google, Yahoo, and Baidu will be 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 will help conduct a basic sentiment analysis about the word.
Project 3 : Google Data Analyst Capstone Project
In this case study, I will perform 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.
Link to video presentation: https://sites.google.com/view/hungtran23/home
Class projects worked on:
- Investigations in Molecular Biology lab: Analyzed the potential for Neurospora crassa orthologs of Saccharomyces cerevisiae MET17 genes to complement deficiencies in S. cerevisiae met strains
- Sustainable Agriculture: Researched and analyzed the state of sustainable agriculture in Vietnam, how Vietnam can improve, and what challenges Vietnam will face
- Geographic Information System: Constructed flood maps of Boston at different degrees of sea level rise, storm surges, and produced suggestions for what neighborhoods can do to avoid the damage while still maintaining visual appeal
- Geography of Global Cities: Surveyed and analyzed beach residents’ satisfaction with a recent beach renewal project that involved reconstructing the sand dunes, beach topography, and nearby commercial area
- Microbiomes: Created a blog to look at how the microbiomes around coral reefs can improve their resilience towards climate change, warming oceans, and acidification
- Plant physiological Ecology: Conducted a survey in West Australia about the status and progress of a mine rehabilitation site by measuring plant respiration rates and morphology. Camped out in the desert for a week in order to measure multiple plots that had different planting conditions
- Environmental Seminar: Led discussion on trash and waste in the ocean, conducted a study on BC food waste to see whether living on or off campus produced more food waste. Presented findings at a research symposium
- Human-Wildlife Conflicts & Interactions: Conducted a study on Cape Cod residents/visitors about their perception on rewilding and what they knew about it using in-person surveys
- Social innovation and entrepreneurship: Wrote a 30 page business plan on the viability and profitability of an indoor aquaponic farm in Dorchester elementary schools. The primary customers would be schools that buy pre-packaged/prepared meals. There would also be potential to sell to parents that come to pick their kids up. The project’s main aim was to tackle food deserts, provide fresh and nutritious food for kids, and allow students the ability to learn and interact with the farm. A secondary goal was to provide a small market place where parents could buy some fresh produce as they’re picking up their kids, cutting down on time needed to grocery shop and prepare meals
- International Environmental Science & Policy: Wrote a mock-memo to the US Senate advocating for the benefit of seaweed as an offshore aquaculture initiative that could help prevent algal blooms by sucking up excess nitrogen runoff, provide habitat for fish which will revitalize local fisheries, and the ability of seaweed to grow fast without any fertilizer or water while sequestering carbon. Wrote a mock-resolution to the UNFAO as the Netherlands advocating for agriculture reform