EconomicCompass

A full-stack forex trading dashboard that pulls economic calendar events, news sentiment, and trading calculators into one personalized view. Built on the MERN stack and deployed on Vercel.

Live app: economic-compass.vercel.app

Demo credentials

Role	Username	Password
Test User	aronpozsar	123123

Guest access shows the dashboard read-only. Logging in unlocks the User Preference Engine — save currency filters, timezone, impact level preferences, and a favourite calculator, all persisted across sessions.

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What it does

• Economic Calendar — Hourly cron job pulls weekly events from the Forex Factory API into MongoDB. The table groups events by date and country, respects the user's saved timezone via moment-timezone, and filters by their preferred currencies and impact levels (High / Medium / Low). Dashboard shows the next 12 events; the full page shows everything.

• News Sentiment Feed — Hourly cron job pulls forex news and per-currency sentiment scores from Alpha Vantage. Displays headline, summary, source, publish time, and ticker_sentiment scores for major currency pairs.

• Position Size Calculator — Given account currency, account size, risk %, and stop loss in pips, computes the correct lot size using live exchange rates from the fawazahmed0 CDN. JPY pairs get automatic 100x pip adjustment.

• Currency Converter — Real-time conversion across 31 currencies using the European Central Bank XML feed, parsed server-side with xml2js.

• User Preference Engine — JWT-authenticated profiles stored in MongoDB. Users can set: timezone, favourite currencies, impact level filters, and a default calculator. Changes sync between localStorage and the backend via PATCH /members/:id.

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Stack

Frontend

Layer	Library / Version
Framework	React 18.3 + Vite 6
UI	Material UI (MUI) v6 + Emotion
Routing	React Router v7
State	Zustand v5
HTTP	Axios
Tables	react-table v7
Date/Time	moment-timezone
Auth	jwt-decode
Testing	Cypress 15.9

Backend

Layer	Library / Version
Framework	Express 4.21 (ES modules)
Database	MongoDB Atlas + Mongoose 8.9
Auth	Passport (local strategy), jsonwebtoken, bcrypt
Validation	express-validator
Security	Helmet (CSP), CORS
Scheduling	node-cron
XML parsing	xml2js
File uploads	Multer

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API endpoints

Method	Path	Auth	Description
GET	/calendar	—	All economic events
GET	/calendar/day/:day	—	Events for today or tomorrow (EST)
GET	/news	—	Forex news + sentiment
POST	/position-size	—	Calculate lot size
POST	/currency-converter	—	Convert currency via ECB rates
POST	/signup	—	Register new user
POST	/login	—	Authenticate, returns JWT
GET	/members/:id	JWT	Get member profile
PATCH	/members/:id	JWT	Update member profile
DELETE	/test/cleanup	—	Delete test_*@example.com users (test env only)

Position size request/response

// POST /position-size
{ "baseCurrency": "EUR", "comparedTo": "USD", "accountSize": 10000, "riskRatio": 1, "stopLoss": 20, "accountCurrency": "USD" }

// Response
{ "lotSize": 0.25 }

Currency converter request/response

// POST /currency-converter
{ "baseCurrency": "USD", "targetCurrency": "EUR", "amount": 1000 }

// Response
{ "convertedAmount": "921.30" }

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Data models

Member

{ username, email, firstName, lastName,
  favCurrencies: String,  // comma-separated: "EUR,USD,GBP"
  timeZone: String,       // e.g. "America/New_York"
  impact: String,         // comma-separated: "High,Medium"
  favCalc: String,        // "posSize" | "currConvert"
  isAdmin: Boolean }

Economics (calendar events)

{ title, country, date, impact, forecast, previous }

News

{ title, url, time_published, summary,
  overall_sentiment_score, overall_sentiment_label,
  ticker_sentiment: [{ ticker, relevance_score, ticker_sentiment_score, ticker_sentiment_label }] }

Getting started

# Backend
cd backend
npm install
npm run dev       # nodemon on PORT=3000

# Frontend (separate terminal)
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev       # Vite on http://localhost:5173

The frontend's Axios base URL points to the Vercel backend by default. To develop locally, change API_URL in frontend/src/utils/index.js to http://localhost:3000.

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Testing

Cypress e2e tests run against http://localhost:5173 with the backend on http://localhost:3000.

cd frontend

npx cypress open   # interactive GUI
npx cypress run    # headless CI mode

Test coverage:

• smoke_test — page navigation and basic content rendering
• auth — full signup → login flow using a unique test user
• calculator_mock — position size form with cy.intercept mocking the backend response
• profile — preference checkbox interactions + PATCH payload verification
• news — news table rendering and graceful 500 error handling

External APIs

API	Used for	Key required
faireconomy.media	Economic calendar data	No
Alpha Vantage	Forex news + sentiment	Yes (free tier)
fawazahmed0 exchange-api	Live FX rates for position sizing	No
ECB XML feed	Live rates for currency converter	No

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