Diamond Handz Tracker
completedA real-time tracker for meme stocks, built during the GameStop saga to make sense of what was actually happening underneath the noise.
the problem
In January 2021, the line between "stock market" and "internet phenomenon" disappeared. The mainstream financial dashboards didn't surface what mattered — Reddit volume, mention velocity, sentiment — and the meme dashboards didn't have actual price data alongside it. I wanted a single screen for both, and I wanted to build it before the moment passed.
the approach
- Price feed — Alpha Vantage REST API on a polling schedule, with backoff for the rate-limit cliff.
- Sentiment feed — Reddit API scraped for /r/wallstreetbets, /r/stocks, /r/superstonk; messages tokenized, scored, and bucketed per ticker per minute.
- Visualization — Chart.js for price overlays, with a custom "Diamond Hands Index" — a synthetic metric combining volatility and mention rate, calibrated to the assumption that meme stocks are dominated by social attention rather than fundamentals.
- No backend — vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, all client-side. Deployment was a single static host.
a hard decision
Whether to bother with sentiment classification or just use raw mention volume. Volume is cheaper and surprisingly correlated with price moves on meme stocks (because the crowd doesn't care about subtlety). But classification surfaces changes in tone — when the crowd flips from confidence to panic — which is the more useful signal. I built both and let users toggle.
what came out
A working dashboard that captured the GME → AMC → BBBY → cycle in real time, plus an honest set of lessons about API rate limits, debouncing, and the mismatch between what the crowd believes and what prices do. Frozen as an artifact of that period; not maintained.
stack
html · css · vanilla javascript · chart.js · alpha vantage api · reddit api