In the beginning of August, a user named “Sam Mac' approached us via our Discord channel. For a course in their bachelor programme they were asked to contribute to a “well established open source project”. As one of the projects mentioned within their course manual was the OpenBB Terminal, Sam Mac contacted us in how they could contribute.
As we are very excited about these type of contributions I decided to contact Sam Mac and arrange a meeting to discuss potential projects their team could work on.
It was clear to me that this was a serious group of students looking for a challenging assignment to work on. As it had to be somewhat related to Data Science, the assignment that was given was the processing of various data series regarding each sector of the S&P 500 for any given time period.
With this information in hand, it will be possible for users of the OpenBB Terminal to compare their performance to that of the S&P 500 on a sector level. This means that you can not only compare total performance but also understand the return of each sector of your portfolio and that of the S&P 500 and how that sector contributed to the total return. For example, it could be that your total return is 10% but that the return comes entirely from the stocks you have within the Technology sector while all other sectors e.g. Basic Materials and Financial Services netted you a negative return. This could, for example, be interpreted as a signal that you either have a too high exposure to the Technology sector or that you need to re-evaluate your allocations to the other sectors. Nonetheless, when your portfolio shares similar characteristics as that of the S&P 500, you have the ability to evaluate your portfolio and your stock picking expertise.
We invite you to understand more about their work in the final presentation the students did at the RMIT University which you can find below.
As the students are currently working on integrating the functionality in the OpenBB Terminal, we will ask them in a different blogpost about their experience working with OpenBB and creating a Pull Request. We are looking forward to our users being able to use this functionality themselves!
Ready to use OpenBB software? Click here.