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Is there any open alternative to a Bloomberg terminal? With Google Finance now gone I’d like to get see what is out there for free.
by RyanShook 8y ago
Is there any open alternative to a Bloomberg terminal? With Google Finance now gone I’d like to get see what is out there for free.
- eli 8y agoThere are barely any true proprietary alternatives, let alone open ones.
- clausok 8y agoThat's true. There's a reasonably steady flow of articles on prospective "Bloomberg Killers"; this one in Institutional Investor (July 2017), Can Anyone Bury Bloomberg, is the best researched and informative that I've seen so far: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1505pdwt02550/can-anyone-bury-bloomberg#.WYsU91GGNPY https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1505pdwt02550...
- swyx 8y agoi used to work at Sentieo (competitor to Money.net), can answer any questions that dont get me sued.
- genieyclo 8y agoHow legit a tool is Money.net? The founder's book on oil is amazing, but I've always been curious about Money.net
- Blackthorn 8y agoI tried it a long time ago (1.5 years?), it sucked. It had pretty much the same fundamentals information you could get anywhere, including the tools that come with an Interactive Brokers account. And...that's it. Nothing else. I wanted to pull up some options data and run some calculations. Very doable on something like Bloomberg, provided you read the manual (the school nearby has a terminal; I could certainly never justify the cost). It's like money.net had never even heard of an option. No analytics capabilities whatsoever.
- swyx 8y agowhat the other guy said. if you're a Bloomberg user, all you'll notice are the missing things. it is a prosumer offering, it doesnt suck, it just isnt targeted for you
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoIt’s not the terminal, it’s the people that feed information and research. The terminal is just access to that information.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dman 8y agoI worked there in a past life, still miss having access to the terminal. Ive always wished they launched a consumer version for <100 USD a month.
- sjs7007 8y agoWhat is something cool/useful that you did on it that's not available from other internet sources?
- JackFr 8y agoMortgage backed security data & analytics.
- sjs7007 8y agoNot sure if you actually mean it or referring to The Big Short. If not joking what function do you use for it?
- cturner 8y agoThe previous post is valid. Other examples, corporate actions (up to date and historic), identifiers for instruments as they appear on particular secondary markets (eg, what is the name if this security on aquis europe), current and historic close prices (for any venue you could name), otc/si trade reports. The broad spread and generally high quality of data is what drives the platform.
- JackFr 8y agoSerious. For bond trading and analytics, often no one has the data other than Bloomberg. INTEX has a lot of MBS and ABS data, Trepp has CMBS data, and I guess there are some muni and corporate specialists, but Bloomberg has it all and at your fingertips with an ergonomic UX, and any analytics you can think of. If you want to actively trade fixed income, you just can't do it without a Bloomberg.
- intended 8y ago
- evrydayhustling 8y agoData aggregation is how the Terminal built its user-base, but messaging is what actually keeps people there. Bloomberg Chat is where most large trades get negotiated -- so if you don't have a login, you don't really have an identity as a trader. Makes it hard to switch. It's a terrific example of network effect as moat. Several years ago, six of the largest banks got together to fund Symphony as a Bloomberg-killing chat tool [1]. More than $100M invested later, it's still only successfully competing with Bloomberg for internal chat at financial firms [2]. Inter-company chats are still happening mainly on full price terminals that costs 100x what Symphony costs for a seat. [1] https://symphony.com/press/releases/consortium-leading-financial-firms-invest-new-communication-workflow-platform https://symphony.com/press/releases/consortium-leading-finan... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97 https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...
- simonbyrne 8y agoAn interesting exception is the energy sector, which used Yahoo Messenger until it was shutdown: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo-idUSKCN10J0SO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo-idUSKCN...
- stevesimmons 8y agoAh, thank you for that explanation. I used to work at a Commodities trading business. I never understood before why Yahoo Messenger was part of their standard Win desktop build. My Precious Metals desk never used it. Makes sense, though, if it was for the energy traders in Houston.
- ren01r 8y agoI'm curious what they use now.
- vostok 8y agoICE Chat and Cloud 9 come to mind. In general it's going to vary from product to product.
- dig1 8y agoSadly no. The only viable (and closed) alternative to Bloomberg Terminal is Eikon from Thomson Reuters [1]. However, I find Routers finance news & details much more accessible than those from Bloomberg as they offer a bunch of rss feeds, depending on category you'd like to track. [1] https://eikon.thomsonreuters.com/index.html https://eikon.thomsonreuters.com/index.html [2] https://www.reuters.com/tools/rss https://www.reuters.com/tools/rss
- EGreg 8y agoI remember Thompson and Reuters joined forces shortly after I left Bloomberg (I worked there on the front end team). I think they wanted to take it on together.
- Immortalin 8y agoTry KloudTrader. We are currently building one. https://KloudTrader.com https://KloudTrader.com
- hantusk 8y agoCheck out www.tiingo.com. I use it for my casual needs.
- macdice 8y agoUsually when I hear people talk about alternatives to Bloomberg, my first though is that that they have no idea how many things Bloomberg actually covers. Sooo many products, so much data, you wouldn't even believe the scale. And yeah, as others have mentioned, massive network effect, essentially everyone in the capital markets. Sure, you might find an alternative for some very narrow specific thing that it does for a lot less money. (Worked there for many years, foreign exchange and bond trading stuff.)
- clausok 8y agoFor example, last year I kicked the tires on Bloomberg's PORT suite of portfolio performance attribution and risk measurement functions to get a sense of what they offered and how programmable it was. In addition to the standard extensive help docs, they had 56 white papers totaling ~1400 pages (as of June 2017) explaining the calculations. And that's for a small star in the Bloomberg constellation.
- trystero 8y agohttp://next.nomics.world/ http://next.nomics.world/
- hangonhn 8y agoGoogle Finance is a laughable comparison to Bloomberg. Bloomberg is basically a self contained world. When I last dealt with it in the early 2000s, it had an internal messaging system, real time feeds for news from all over the world, and ability to trade and query on all sorts of markets around the globe. IIRC, your Bloomberg messaging handle is yours basically for life so no matter which company you work for you can still be reachable. It also integrates well with Excel and provides a huge amount of complex financial calculation functions (which I suppose Google or some other alternative might be able to do too, assuming they can hire the people who has the expertise). Oh and around the clock support. The only alternative that's even remotely close to that is Reuter's service. You can see why that's the only alternative -- very few organizations have the means to tap into all these data sources from around the world in basically real time. You need to use a Bloomberg terminal and observe its users use them to really get an idea of what it provides before you can make a reasonable suggestion for an alternative.