According to Anjargolian, development follows a “light” agile process and tracks tasks using Pivotal Tracker. Most ideas for new projects come from Caleb, the sales and customer service teams, and market research. These suggestions are vetted to measure their impact and are then turned into requirement documents. Caleb says the team releases new features every week, whether client-facing or general software improvements.
YCharts is hosted on Amazon Web Services. The back end is written in Python and uses a Django codebase. The YCharts front end is written in JavaScript, with several frameworks like Highcharts that power the visualization tools.
“The whole stack, the way we deploy code, there are artifacts that are generated. Those artifacts are instantiated in AWS. And they can scale up and scale down based on the need or time.” – Anjargolian
Data Sources And Integration Partners
Eplett explains that the primary data provider for YCharts is Morningstar, which provides mutual fund, equity, and underlying data. Estimates and equity data are provided by Capital IQ and SMP. The rest of the data used by YCharts are sourced by various providers, and Eplett says YCharts has its own database, with economic data that have over a quarter million different economic indicator time series. The economic data come from government sources such as the Census Bureau.
As for active integrations, YCharts is deeply integrated with TD Ameritrade’s Veo and Veo One. Additionally, the company has ties with Schwab and plans to integrate portfolio management tools.
“We think data is a commodity. And so, we think there’s a lot of good sources for data out there, whether it’s third parties or us cultivating the data ourselves. Where we think we really make a difference is personality, the software-based, cloud-based personality we give to that data to make it insightful, usable, create pictures, create understanding, communicate insights.” – Brown
Biggest Challenges In The Coming Future
The greatest challenge for YCharts has been the same since its founding in 2009—staying focused on the thing that’s most important to the customer base over the long term. Brown says there is always an urge to delve into other areas that may provide short-term gains; however, he adds that these gains generally do not serve the right long-term interests. YCharts focuses on serving its clients, which consist of wealth advisors and asset managers.
“Our challenge is their [advisors] life is changing. Their world is changing. And how can we be two steps ahead of them to make sure we’re more than ready when they’ve decided on a strategy that works for them?” – Brown