SMBC Market Watch

A Meme Financial Headline Generator

What Is This?

I woke up one morning, and as am I am wont to do, was randomly wandering through the SMBC archive
when I came across this webcomic from 2020:

and I thought to myself, "Hey, I bet I could code that pretty easily!"

which is exactly what I did.

How does it work?

The two components going into generating the headlines were:

• getting market data (is the market up or down on any given day?)
• getting news headlines

I figured the first would be easy and the second would be hard, but the reverse ended up being true,
as most Finance APIs I could find were either decommissioned (Google), paid (NASDAQ DataLink) or
didn't contain composite indices (Alpha Vantage). Luckily, not only is Yahoo Finance
still around, but there's even a well-maintained Python package called yfinance
that I could use without even creating a developer account!

On the news side, I found this handy list of news media APIs and decided to go with
The Guardian. Their documentation was excellent and their API was extremely easy
to use.

If you'd like to get a deeper look at how I combined the two halves, have a look at the
the development notebook
or just jump straight into the script that generates the posts. To run
the code, you'll need an environment with:

• Python 3.11 or newer (if your system doesn't ship with one, I highly recommend mambaforge across any system.
• yfinance
• requests
• JupyterLab is optional but highly recommended.
• You'll also need to register with The Guardian's Open Platform
  and snag an API key.

If you're interested in learning about the website side of things, take a read through the
Hugo quickstart guide. This project uses
the Blonde theme, so have a look at their documentation
as well.

If you're interested in the automation portion (new content is updated daily), it's all done
via GitHub Actions

Contribution and Licensing

The project is licensed under the Affero GPL and all contributions, uses and modifications
must be done under those terms (read: if you spin up your own site, you must make the source code
publicly available under the AGPL).