Vallura

Valura AI — Production-Grade Financial Assistant....

Valura AI is a high-performance, real-time financial intelligence platform designed for reliability, deterministic accuracy, and resilient market reactivity.

🚀 Production-Grade Features

1. Zero Hardcode Real-Time Data

The system has been upgraded to eliminate all static financial data. All metrics are dynamically derived from live market conditions:

• Market Data Service: Integrates with yfinance to fetch real-time prices, historical returns, and sector information.
• Dynamic Benchmarking: Portfolio performance is calculated against live SPY (S&P 500) data to compute real-time Alpha.
• Smart Caching: Implements a 15-second TTL (Time-To-Live) cache for prices and 1-hour for metadata to balance real-time feel with API efficiency.

2. Resilient Architecture

Designed to never fail, even when external APIs are slow or down:

• 5-Second Timeout Gate: All data-heavy operations are protected by a 5-second timeout.
• Partial Result Fallback: If market data is slow, the system gracefully streams "Partial Insights" using the best available/cached data instead of timing out.
• Hybrid Classification: Automatically falls back to a rule-based engine if LLM (Groq/OpenAI) inference fails.

3. Intelligent Portfolio Analytics

The portfolio_health agent now provides human-level, context-aware insights:

• Sector Volatility Analysis: Recognizes when concentration in a specific ticker (e.g., NVDA) creates exposure to broader sector risks (e.g., Semiconductors).
• Behavioral Guidance: Tailors observations to the user's risk profile (Conservative/Moderate/Aggressive).
• Onboarding Engine: Provides BUILD-oriented guidance for empty portfolios instead of error states.

📐 Architectural Flow

graph TD
    User[User Query] --> Safety[Safety Guard]
    Safety -- Blocked --> StreamBlocked[SSE: blocked]
    Safety -- Passed --> Classifier[Hybrid Classifier]
    Classifier --> Router[Agent Router]
    Router --> MarketData[Market Data Service]
    MarketData -- 5s Timeout --> Agent[Portfolio Health Agent]
    Agent -- Partial/Full --> Memory[Session Memory]
    Memory --> SSE[SSE: Progressive Stream]

🛠️ Tech Stack & Justifications

• FastAPI: Chosen for its high performance, native asyncio support, and excellent Pydantic v2 integration, which ensures strict type safety across the pipeline.
• sse-starlette: Provides a robust, lightweight implementation of the SSE protocol, fitting the assignment's streaming requirement perfectly.
• yfinance: Used as the primary market data source as it provides a comprehensive, free API for stocks, ETFs, and indices without requiring complex API keys for a prototype.
• Groq (Llama 3 70B): Selected for the Intent Classifier to meet the < 2s first-token latency target. Its inference speed is unmatched for real-time classification.
• OpenAI (GPT-4o-mini): Used for the optional AI Insight generation in the Portfolio Health agent due to its low cost and high reasoning quality.

💾 Session Memory

Implementation: In-memory dictionary. Justification: For a production-thinking prototype and demo, in-memory storage provides the lowest latency and zero infrastructure overhead. The system is designed with a BaseMemory interface, making it trivial to swap in Redis or Postgres for a multi-node production deployment.

📊 Cost & Performance (Measured)

Measurements taken during a 50-query load test using Llama 3 70B on Groq and GPT-4o-mini on OpenAI.

Note: Latency measured using internal telemetry from the SSE status events. Costs calculated based on current Groq/OpenAI pricing for input/output tokens.

⚙️ Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the root directory:

# Required for LLM Classification
GROQ_API_KEY=your_groq_key_here

# Optional: For AI Portfolio Insights
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_key_here

# Model Overrides (Optional)
GROQ_MODEL=llama3-70b-8192
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4o-mini

🎥 Submission Video

Watch the 10-minute walkthrough here

🧪 Execution

# 1. Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 2. Start the server
uvicorn src.main:app --reload

# 3. Access the UI
# Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser

📐 Design Decisions & Trade-offs

• Deterministic Math: Financial calculations are handled by pure Python/Pandas logic to ensure regulatory-grade accuracy and eliminate LLM "hallucinations" in portfolio values.
• Resilient Pipeline: The 5-second timeout gate on market data ensures that even if yfinance or upstream APIs are slow, the user receives a response with partial insights rather than a timeout error.
• Safety First: The synchronous SafetyGuard runs at O(1) time complexity (well under 1ms), ensuring that harmful queries are blocked before any expensive LLM resources are consumed.