Master Trader

Insider Trading for the Public Good

January 2025
HackAZ 2025

Background

Master Trader is a full-stack financial simulation platform built during HackAZ 2025 as a deliberately unserious project that we took too seriously.

The premise was straightforward: if public officials are allowed to trade stocks while in office, what if we simply copied their behavior and automated it? We pulled real congressional trading data from CapitolTrades.com and fed it into an LLM to generate stock recommendations modeled after the trading patterns of various political figures.

The result is an AI-powered "financial advisor" that confidently recommends stocks based on the same information that is publicly available, legally disclosed, and apparently not a problem. The platform presents these recommendations through a chatbot interface that stays in character to your AI companinon, offering financial advice with the appropriate level of certainty.

Technically, the project is fully deployed on AWS, with a React frontend hosted on Amplify, Lambda functions handling serverless backend logic, and DynamoDB for data storage. We integrated real-time market data and built the system end-to-end over the course of the hackathon.

During judging, we were asked about potential legal ramifications of the project. We told them "Who asked? And who cares?"

While the project is essentially a shitpost, it nevertheless was a serious and professional full stack development project that me and the team are proud of. Please take a look at it whenever you get the chance!

Gallery

Master Trader homepage with AI chatbot interface

Master Trader homepage with AI chatbot interface

Master Trader homepage with AI chatbot interface
The team at HackAZ 2025. Photograhped Left to Right: Kazuaki Kurita, Elias Zheng, Ryan Luu, Zak Kaczmarowski, Sage Newton.
Chicken is no ordinary bird. With over 2000% returns in the past 5 years, this legendary trader has clucked their way to the top of the stock market. But don't expect any flashy interviews or extravagant announcements. Chicken is known for being extremely secretive about their trades. They've built an empire by keeping things quiet, only offering a few carefully chosen tips to those who earn their trust. If you manage to crack the code and catch Chicken on a good day, you might just get the inside scoop that's worth more than a lifetime supply of corn. Chicken's algorithm? Well, that's a closely guarded secret. Rumor has it, it's based on years of experience watching the world from a perch, seeing things others miss. All we know for sure is that it's legendary, and if you ever get a glimpse of it, consider yourself very lucky. Until then, you'll just have to trust the process... and hope for a little chicken (c)luck!
AI-generated stock prediction in the style of a well-known political figure (read: undergraduate buisness student)
Early concept sketches and brainstorming for the Master Trader platform
AWS architecture diagram showing the full-stack implementation
Sample congressional trading data JSON structure pulled from CapitolTrades.com API
Behind the scenes: late-night coding session during HackAZ 2025
Debugging the Lambda functions and API integrations. We pulled an all-nighter!
Team collaboration during the final hours of the hackathon

Key Features

  • AI-powered stock recommendations based on congressional trading patterns.
  • Professionally sound advice on which stocks to buy (^_~)
  • Full-stack AWS architecture with serverless backend
  • Real-time integration with CapitolTrades.com data
  • Interactive chatbot interface with personality-driven responses
  • Automated CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions
  • Scalable DynamoDB database for storing trading data and user interactions

Technologies

ReactAWS AmplifyAWS LambdaAPI GatewayPythonDynamoDBS3GitHub CI/CDOpenAI API