Motivation
This mini project stemmed from a curiosity about long-term investing and financial independence. I built an interactive Streamlit app that helps users like me visualize how their investments could grow over time—based on custom inputs like monthly contributions, expected returns, inflation, and retirement timelines.
This project helped me explore the basics of financial literacy through code—translating abstract investing concepts into tangible simulations. It also sharpened my data storytelling skills by turning static formulas into visual, interactive tools that users could learn from.
The HCI concept that I successfully tested here was how visualization improves cognitive understanding of a concept by making abstract information concrete, aiding memory, and simplifying complex concepts through the creation of mental images or external visual aids
What sparked this project Idea ?
This project is based on this video by Big Think where William Ackman introduces finance and investing in under an hour. The video is pretty much a classic and has over 12M views. Around the 21:30 mark, Ackman emphasizes the power of compound interest and how starting early can dramatically shape one’s financial future. That message really stuck with me.
But here’s the catch: while the principles are universal, everyone’s capacity to invest is completely different.
This chart (from the video) really clicked with me, but I struggled to internalize the idea of $4M USD. Partly because I earn in INR, and partly because I hadn’t even crossed 10,000 that year, let alone had the chance to invest it. For those reasons, it felt more like an abstract theory than a lived reality—despite the chart itself being undeniably practical.
That disconnect highlights a classic challenge in human–computer interaction: static representations often fail to accommodate the user’s context. Our ability to reason about numbers improves drastically when information is grounded in our own frame of reference. Visualizations become far more powerful when they shift from being universal illustrations to adaptive tools that respond to the individual.
That’s why I built a fully interactive tool where users can input their own values—transforming the chart from a static artifact into a personalized simulation. In doing so, the visualization doesn’t just inform; it engages, contextualizes, and ultimately makes the abstract concrete.
So I built a fully interactive tool where users can input their own values—
Currency Type
Amount to Invest
Expected Rate (%)
Years to Project
—and instantly see how their money could grow. Once you click Invest, the simulator brings your unique projection to life. The number you see isn’t just theoretical—it’s yours to believe in and work toward.
This tool is my way of turning foundational investing concepts into something personal, visual, and actionable.
How was this tool made ?
This interactive web app was built using Streamlit, a Python library designed for rapidly developing data apps. Inspired by the investing lecture, I used this project as an opportunity to explore Streamlit’s capabilities. Along the way, I encountered several development challenges that pushed me to expand my toolkit—learning libraries like Pillow (for image handling), BeautifulSoup (for web scraping), and Requests (for data retrieval). I also used pathlib to make the app more portable and resilient to file path changes across different environments.
Streamlit turned out to be an ideal platform to bring this concept to life—simple enough to get started quickly, yet powerful enough to build a clean, intuitive, and fully functional user interface.
Who is William Ackman ?
Bill Ackman—the man behind the Big Think video that inspired this tool—is the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund managing over $16 billion in assets. His stock portfolio is highly concentrated, featuring just seven companies, including Chipotle, Hilton, and Alphabet (Google’s parent).
If you visit the live app, you'll notice it even fetches Ackman's net worth at that time of publishing pulled from Forbes on the day the project was published.
As of writing this, his net worth stands at $9.4 billion—more than double what it was just a year and three months ago.
What would you call that? Compound interest?
Not exactly. But it does show what long-term conviction, smart investing, and time can do.
Motivation
This mini project stemmed from a curiosity about long-term investing and financial independence. I built an interactive Streamlit app that helps users like me visualize how their investments could grow over time—based on custom inputs like monthly contributions, expected returns, inflation, and retirement timelines.
This project helped me explore the basics of financial literacy through code—translating abstract investing concepts into tangible simulations. It also sharpened my data storytelling skills by turning static formulas into visual, interactive tools that users could learn from.
The HCI concept that I successfully tested here was how visualization improves cognitive understanding of a concept by making abstract information concrete, aiding memory, and simplifying complex concepts through the creation of mental images or external visual aids
What sparked this project Idea ?
This project is based on this video by Big Think where William Ackman introduces finance and investing in under an hour. The video is pretty much a classic and has over 12M views. Around the 21:30 mark, Ackman emphasizes the power of compound interest and how starting early can dramatically shape one’s financial future. That message really stuck with me.
But here’s the catch: while the principles are universal, everyone’s capacity to invest is completely different.
This chart (from the video) really clicked with me, but I struggled to internalize the idea of $4M USD. Partly because I earn in INR, and partly because I hadn’t even crossed 10,000 that year, let alone had the chance to invest it. For those reasons, it felt more like an abstract theory than a lived reality—despite the chart itself being undeniably practical.
That disconnect highlights a classic challenge in human–computer interaction: static representations often fail to accommodate the user’s context. Our ability to reason about numbers improves drastically when information is grounded in our own frame of reference. Visualizations become far more powerful when they shift from being universal illustrations to adaptive tools that respond to the individual.
That’s why I built a fully interactive tool where users can input their own values—transforming the chart from a static artifact into a personalized simulation. In doing so, the visualization doesn’t just inform; it engages, contextualizes, and ultimately makes the abstract concrete.
So I built a fully interactive tool where users can input their own values—
Currency Type
Amount to Invest
Expected Rate (%)
Years to Project
—and instantly see how their money could grow. Once you click Invest, the simulator brings your unique projection to life. The number you see isn’t just theoretical—it’s yours to believe in and work toward.
This tool is my way of turning foundational investing concepts into something personal, visual, and actionable.
How was this tool made ?
This interactive web app was built using Streamlit, a Python library designed for rapidly developing data apps. Inspired by the investing lecture, I used this project as an opportunity to explore Streamlit’s capabilities. Along the way, I encountered several development challenges that pushed me to expand my toolkit—learning libraries like Pillow (for image handling), BeautifulSoup (for web scraping), and Requests (for data retrieval). I also used pathlib to make the app more portable and resilient to file path changes across different environments.
Streamlit turned out to be an ideal platform to bring this concept to life—simple enough to get started quickly, yet powerful enough to build a clean, intuitive, and fully functional user interface.
Who is William Ackman ?
Bill Ackman—the man behind the Big Think video that inspired this tool—is the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund managing over $16 billion in assets. His stock portfolio is highly concentrated, featuring just seven companies, including Chipotle, Hilton, and Alphabet (Google’s parent).
If you visit the live app, you'll notice it even fetches Ackman's net worth at that time of publishing pulled from Forbes on the day the project was published.
As of writing this, his net worth stands at $9.4 billion—more than double what it was just a year and three months ago.
What would you call that? Compound interest?
Not exactly. But it does show what long-term conviction, smart investing, and time can do.
Motivation
This mini project stemmed from a curiosity about long-term investing and financial independence. I built an interactive Streamlit app that helps users like me visualize how their investments could grow over time—based on custom inputs like monthly contributions, expected returns, inflation, and retirement timelines.
This project helped me explore the basics of financial literacy through code—translating abstract investing concepts into tangible simulations. It also sharpened my data storytelling skills by turning static formulas into visual, interactive tools that users could learn from.
The HCI concept that I successfully tested here was how visualization improves cognitive understanding of a concept by making abstract information concrete, aiding memory, and simplifying complex concepts through the creation of mental images or external visual aids
What sparked this project Idea ?
This project is based on this video by Big Think where William Ackman introduces finance and investing in under an hour. The video is pretty much a classic and has over 12M views. Around the 21:30 mark, Ackman emphasizes the power of compound interest and how starting early can dramatically shape one’s financial future. That message really stuck with me.
But here’s the catch: while the principles are universal, everyone’s capacity to invest is completely different.
This chart (from the video) really clicked with me, but I struggled to internalize the idea of $4M USD. Partly because I earn in INR, and partly because I hadn’t even crossed 10,000 that year, let alone had the chance to invest it. For those reasons, it felt more like an abstract theory than a lived reality—despite the chart itself being undeniably practical.
That disconnect highlights a classic challenge in human–computer interaction: static representations often fail to accommodate the user’s context. Our ability to reason about numbers improves drastically when information is grounded in our own frame of reference. Visualizations become far more powerful when they shift from being universal illustrations to adaptive tools that respond to the individual.
That’s why I built a fully interactive tool where users can input their own values—transforming the chart from a static artifact into a personalized simulation. In doing so, the visualization doesn’t just inform; it engages, contextualizes, and ultimately makes the abstract concrete.
So I built a fully interactive tool where users can input their own values—
Currency Type
Amount to Invest
Expected Rate (%)
Years to Project
—and instantly see how their money could grow. Once you click Invest, the simulator brings your unique projection to life. The number you see isn’t just theoretical—it’s yours to believe in and work toward.
This tool is my way of turning foundational investing concepts into something personal, visual, and actionable.
How was this tool made ?
This interactive web app was built using Streamlit, a Python library designed for rapidly developing data apps. Inspired by the investing lecture, I used this project as an opportunity to explore Streamlit’s capabilities. Along the way, I encountered several development challenges that pushed me to expand my toolkit—learning libraries like Pillow (for image handling), BeautifulSoup (for web scraping), and Requests (for data retrieval). I also used pathlib to make the app more portable and resilient to file path changes across different environments.
Streamlit turned out to be an ideal platform to bring this concept to life—simple enough to get started quickly, yet powerful enough to build a clean, intuitive, and fully functional user interface.
Who is William Ackman ?
Bill Ackman—the man behind the Big Think video that inspired this tool—is the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund managing over $16 billion in assets. His stock portfolio is highly concentrated, featuring just seven companies, including Chipotle, Hilton, and Alphabet (Google’s parent).
If you visit the live app, you'll notice it even fetches Ackman's net worth at that time of publishing pulled from Forbes on the day the project was published.
As of writing this, his net worth stands at $9.4 billion—more than double what it was just a year and three months ago.
What would you call that? Compound interest?
Not exactly. But it does show what long-term conviction, smart investing, and time can do.