5 ms·

Gamestonk Terminal – Stock and crypto market terminal

70 points by sexy_year 5y ago

sexy_year 5y ago
Hey guys, I just want to follow-up on the terminal progress as it has been some time now. We're still working pretty fast on the terminal, adding new features almost every 2/3 days. And the prediction is that this will continue for a while. The more we grow, the bigger the community and interest around the terminal. This includes not only users, but companies approaching us to integrate their data, which is great. Hence, if you are interested in helping out in some shape/form, please reach out (https://discord.gg/Up2QGbMKHY https://discord.gg/Up2QGbMKHY). There's definitely a lot to do! Sorry for last time not being able to reply to the comments, I was constantly being PM'd to fix/improve the repo (mainly because I didn't expect it to get so much traction in a day), that I barely slept the days after trying to improve the installation, and helping users one by one with the install process. It is now in a much better shape, though. Feedback is welcome!
mnahkies 5y ago
This looks great. It's a shame how many API keys you need to fully take advantage of it though. Do you see any opportunity for consolidation in this space? I'd love a one click start Bloomberg. I'd also be interested how this might effect the wider market once everyone has the same information
- chopdcheez212 5y ago
  Booomberg has that same “API key” problem. It really requires an institutional procurement and legal team to get all the market data feeds you need.
  - mnahkies 5y ago
    Oh interesting, I've not got a Bloomberg but kinda assumed for the price that it was as turn key as they come, ie: majority of the value is in the APIs they grant access to. If you have to pay on top for various APIs what's the point?
    - sexy_year 5y ago
      Currently the terminal requests API keys that only give access to free tier features. This is so that we can say that every user has access to the exact same features, regardless of whether they have a subscription to a specific API. This is likely going to continue for a while. However, at some point, we may want to add premium features associated with these APIs. Because if the user is paying such subscription, it makes sense to provide that data on the terminal. Since this will only benefit a small subset of our users, we are deeming this as low priority
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    This is both true and false. Out of the box, the Bloomberg terminal comes with data required to make it functional for most professional purposes. If I had my terminal, I can load up a random Taiwanese (or any market) stock right now and see the price, tape history, etc. with no prior setup. However, if I was a Taiwanese trader or market maker, I'd likely pay Taiwanese exchange fees to get access to richer, real-time data (specifically, non-delayed quotes and more market depth.) I can get this access in under 5 seconds by opting into the desired exchange privileges under EXC<GO> or most likely just pinging my Bloomberg rep. If I remember correctly, I have to log out and back in for the new permissions to permeate my terminal. The cool thing is that all functions automatically leverage the highest level of subscribed data. Whether I need to jump through more procurement hoops than that depends on where I work. If I am in a small hedge fund, I can just "do this" and if I am in a big firm, we likely already have this data subscribed for. One of the many reasons Bloomberg exists and continues to be immensely valuable is that it prevents you from having to mess around with individual exchange permissions and data in a one-off way. And don't get me started on normalizing data across exchanges - the fact that Bloomberg does that for you is worth the price alone. Source: Former Bloomberg employee, former Bloomberg market data client.
    - xyzelement 5y ago
      To add further color, it works this way because exchanges insist on it. Market data is one of exchanges' key revenue sources and they require their vendors (like Bloomberg) to police it tightly. When someone subscribes to elevated levels of market data, Bloomberg passes 100% of that money to the exchange. It is a major convenience factor that Bloomberg abstracts all your market data usage for you. On the flip side, if you use data in your own systems, you basically sign up for a world of pain in terms of exchange fees and pricing compliance. A small example: exchanges may change you per consumer application. So if you have two trading systems, you lay double. But this gets thrny in distributed applications - you may have multiple data connections but it's really just shards of systems parallelized for performance. As a consumer, you face the choice of overpaying for exchange data or risking having to prove that your systems are technical compliant by design depiute the seemingly extra consumer connections. This is a nightmare, which is why firms try to do everything they can on Bloomberg if possible to avoid stepping into this space.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sexy_year 5y ago
  True. What most users do is that they work with the terminal as it comes, and as soon as they start needing an API key they go and get it. E.g. I don't trade forex, for me it doesn't make sense to set an Oanda account to get access to this information. It's hard to improve in this space because we want to keep the terminal free. And exploiting each of the free tiers of these APIs makes that possible at the moment. Our GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal2 has a Proof of concept GUI, where it works with a one click start. Although API keys still need to be provided.
sam_goody 5y ago
Offer a paid support tier. Or offer an official "Business" Fork, with a more corporate name, and which has a monthly support fee. No reason not to make money off of a project, especially if it makes it more sustainable.
- random3455699 5y ago
  There is enough money to be made from knowledge everyone gains through sharing and working together on a project. Open Source and open knowledge is what has been changing the world for the past four decades.
  - sexy_year 5y ago
    Couldn't agree more with this. I've learned so much these past couple of months. But having a more sustainable project with at least 1 full-time dev, would be very welcomy
- sexy_year 5y ago
  Yes, this is definitely something we have in mind. Mostly because the user base starts to be quite big with a lot of feature requests, and bug fixes to be done. And currently we are only like 2/3 devs working on our spare time, it would be great to be able to have someone working on this full time. However, we have to handle this carefully, because we don't want to charge the average retail trader, that's the whole motto of the project :)
- grizzles 5y ago
  Yep I'll be a customer. Not having to apply for keys / the API aggregation feature alone is enough for it to be worth it to me. That it's built for python data stack on top is the icing on the cake.
davidcbc 5y ago
It seems like an interesting project, but tying it to the Reddit garbage makes it hard to take seriously.
- mnahkies 5y ago
  I think this is unfair. I read it as a tongue in check nod to the Reddit craze, but don't think it should change your opinion of the project itself
  - davidcbc 5y ago
    I mean, if it was some kind of open source medical software that tried to play into the essential oils nonsense I would feel the same way. If you want to be a legitimate product don't associate yourself with the kooks
    - random3455699 5y ago
      Reddit's movement is organic. It may be silly, it may be misguided, it may be doing more harm than good, but people are uniting against institutions that have been taking advantage of little guys. If you are disgusted by the predatory nature of the financial system that monetizes information asymmetry, why not join the movement and help leveling the playing field? There is strength in numbers.
      - davidcbc 5y ago
        Because I think it's gonna end with a lot of people losing money they can't afford to lose.
        sexy_year 5y ago
        I think most of the people underestimate the Reddit crowd. If you scroll through the reddit posts, 9 out of 10 are shit posts. But that other one is actually really good DD, by retail traders with 9-5 jobs that go a long way to understand what's going on under the hood. Not conspiracy theories, but actually backing up by data. There's a reason why HF are closing down due to shorting GME (https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-based-hedge-fund-that-bet-against-gamestop-shuts-down-ft-2021-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-based-hedge-fund-tha...). However, I agree with you guys that if we want to become more "legitimate" we need to consider a change in the name. Although our intention remains the same, to combine our efforts and leverage data to the average retail trader that can't afford a Bloomberg terminal, or even a paid subscription to another SW.
EMM_386 5y ago
The emoji for "diamond hands" is wrong. It puts the hands before the diamond. This makes me seriously question the whole project. I'm only half-joking ... after all, this is supposed to be targeted towards this demographic. Perhaps I should just do a pull request.
nindalf 5y ago
Looks like a fantastic project. ~~@dang could we get a simpler title like “Gamestonk Terminal - a FOSS alternative to Bloomberg Terminal”~~
- sexy_year 5y ago
  Love it. Just changed the "about" on the repo to that. Thanks! https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal
adeelk93 5y ago
This is a very interesting project, but you need to stop likening it to a Bloomberg terminal. By doing so, it comes off as a letdown by doing so little, rather than being impressive for doing so much with open source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260019 I looked through the features to see if my impression was wrong now, but seeing a new feature called Government that didn’t even acknowledge Treasuries has confirmed the weakness of this comparison.
- random3455699 5y ago
  https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/main/gamestonk_terminal/economy https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/...
  - 1996 5y ago
    Exactly: features will be coming. It just takes time for free software to match commercial offering at first, but eventually it surpasses them (too many example to list) for 90% of the uses. If it let me cancel my Bloomberg subscription, why not? All I want is reddit + twitter firehose sentiment mining, accurate plot of basic (EURUSD, wood futures) and not so basic (VIX) things. I do not need to keep track of cargo ships on a map.
    - adeelk93 5y ago
      That sounds like great free software. But again, to quote from that thread a few months ago: The only thing that this shares with the bloomberg terminal is that it can do equities and is on a terminal. That above Gamestonk Economy page showing how you can pull `dgs5` from FRED, is basically unrelated to the `GOVT` functionality on Bloomberg. You have to understand, quoting an index is a whole other league from pricing information on individual bonds; anyone can do the former, but Bloomberg does the latter.
- sexy_year 5y ago
  I agree with you. The reason why we still link it to Bloomberg is because of the vision we have, not the current state of the project. Kind of similar to a self-driving startup mentioning that they will become a Tesla - It's not true, but you get the idea and concept. I made the repo open-source first at the end of February, given that we are only 3 devs (2 adding features and 1 dev ops) all with full-time jobs, there's only so much we can get our hands on. I don't have access to Bloomberg Terminal. But I'm pretty confident that there are features that we've got that Bloomberg doesn't. E.g. we have a screener for stocks that can be specified by our user base and made available by everyone (https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/main/gamestonk_terminal/screener/presets https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/...). This is what having an open-source project can bring, combining collective knowledge of the community.
mylons 5y ago
cool stuff, but why do you need anaconda AND poetry to install? shouldn’t one be sufficient?
- random3455699 5y ago
  Anaconda for Windows and ML support and poetry for dependency management.
  - sexy_year 5y ago
    Anaconda is more because it makes it easier to install python. A lot of our users have never coded before, and we found that installing python through Anaconda seemed the best option.
  - mylons 5y ago
    hm, if i were doing this on windows i’d be using the WSL, but i guess it’s personal preference
    - random3455699 5y ago
      WSL is still evolving, although very promising. Browser and UI (displaying charts) integration is not great with WSL. Perhaps one day.
      - mylons 5y ago
        you’re not wrong about the graphs, but saving to a file is possible
siproprio 5y ago
It's a very promising project. Unfortunately, I was not able to successfully install it following the Getting Started install instructions.
fouc 5y ago
I actually really enjoy this sort of text-based Menu & Query interface, it makes it easy to discover & easy to remember command combinations! I wish more CLI apps offered this type of interface. Does anyone know if there's a specific name for this type of interface? (Like fdisk in linux)
- jewel 5y ago
  I call that a "gnu readline" interface. I suppose you could also call it a "zork" interface, especially if there is a lot of state that can be navigated. Compare with "curses" for an ascii-art gui like alsamixer.

70 points by sexy_year 5y ago

Hey guys, I just want to follow-up on the terminal progress as it has been some time now. We're still working pretty fast on the terminal, adding new features almost every 2/3 days. And the prediction is that this will continue for a while. The more we grow, the bigger the community and interest around the terminal. This includes not only users, but companies approaching us to integrate their data, which is great. Hence, if you are interested in helping out in some shape/form, please reach out (https://discord.gg/Up2QGbMKHY https://discord.gg/Up2QGbMKHY). There's definitely a lot to do! Sorry for last time not being able to reply to the comments, I was constantly being PM'd to fix/improve the repo (mainly because I didn't expect it to get so much traction in a day), that I barely slept the days after trying to improve the installation, and helping users one by one with the install process. It is now in a much better shape, though. Feedback is welcome!

mnahkies 5y ago

This looks great. It's a shame how many API keys you need to fully take advantage of it though. Do you see any opportunity for consolidation in this space? I'd love a one click start Bloomberg. I'd also be interested how this might effect the wider market once everyone has the same information

chopdcheez212 5y ago
Booomberg has that same “API key” problem. It really requires an institutional procurement and legal team to get all the market data feeds you need.
- mnahkies 5y ago
  Oh interesting, I've not got a Bloomberg but kinda assumed for the price that it was as turn key as they come, ie: majority of the value is in the APIs they grant access to. If you have to pay on top for various APIs what's the point?
  - sexy_year 5y ago
    Currently the terminal requests API keys that only give access to free tier features. This is so that we can say that every user has access to the exact same features, regardless of whether they have a subscription to a specific API. This is likely going to continue for a while. However, at some point, we may want to add premium features associated with these APIs. Because if the user is paying such subscription, it makes sense to provide that data on the terminal. Since this will only benefit a small subset of our users, we are deeming this as low priority
- xyzelement 5y ago
  This is both true and false. Out of the box, the Bloomberg terminal comes with data required to make it functional for most professional purposes. If I had my terminal, I can load up a random Taiwanese (or any market) stock right now and see the price, tape history, etc. with no prior setup. However, if I was a Taiwanese trader or market maker, I'd likely pay Taiwanese exchange fees to get access to richer, real-time data (specifically, non-delayed quotes and more market depth.) I can get this access in under 5 seconds by opting into the desired exchange privileges under EXC<GO> or most likely just pinging my Bloomberg rep. If I remember correctly, I have to log out and back in for the new permissions to permeate my terminal. The cool thing is that all functions automatically leverage the highest level of subscribed data. Whether I need to jump through more procurement hoops than that depends on where I work. If I am in a small hedge fund, I can just "do this" and if I am in a big firm, we likely already have this data subscribed for. One of the many reasons Bloomberg exists and continues to be immensely valuable is that it prevents you from having to mess around with individual exchange permissions and data in a one-off way. And don't get me started on normalizing data across exchanges - the fact that Bloomberg does that for you is worth the price alone. Source: Former Bloomberg employee, former Bloomberg market data client.
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    To add further color, it works this way because exchanges insist on it. Market data is one of exchanges' key revenue sources and they require their vendors (like Bloomberg) to police it tightly. When someone subscribes to elevated levels of market data, Bloomberg passes 100% of that money to the exchange. It is a major convenience factor that Bloomberg abstracts all your market data usage for you. On the flip side, if you use data in your own systems, you basically sign up for a world of pain in terms of exchange fees and pricing compliance. A small example: exchanges may change you per consumer application. So if you have two trading systems, you lay double. But this gets thrny in distributed applications - you may have multiple data connections but it's really just shards of systems parallelized for performance. As a consumer, you face the choice of overpaying for exchange data or risking having to prove that your systems are technical compliant by design depiute the seemingly extra consumer connections. This is a nightmare, which is why firms try to do everything they can on Bloomberg if possible to avoid stepping into this space.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sexy_year 5y ago
True. What most users do is that they work with the terminal as it comes, and as soon as they start needing an API key they go and get it. E.g. I don't trade forex, for me it doesn't make sense to set an Oanda account to get access to this information. It's hard to improve in this space because we want to keep the terminal free. And exploiting each of the free tiers of these APIs makes that possible at the moment. Our GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal2 has a Proof of concept GUI, where it works with a one click start. Although API keys still need to be provided.

sam_goody 5y ago

Offer a paid support tier. Or offer an official "Business" Fork, with a more corporate name, and which has a monthly support fee. No reason not to make money off of a project, especially if it makes it more sustainable.

random3455699 5y ago
There is enough money to be made from knowledge everyone gains through sharing and working together on a project. Open Source and open knowledge is what has been changing the world for the past four decades.
- sexy_year 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more with this. I've learned so much these past couple of months. But having a more sustainable project with at least 1 full-time dev, would be very welcomy
sexy_year 5y ago
Yes, this is definitely something we have in mind. Mostly because the user base starts to be quite big with a lot of feature requests, and bug fixes to be done. And currently we are only like 2/3 devs working on our spare time, it would be great to be able to have someone working on this full time. However, we have to handle this carefully, because we don't want to charge the average retail trader, that's the whole motto of the project :)
grizzles 5y ago
Yep I'll be a customer. Not having to apply for keys / the API aggregation feature alone is enough for it to be worth it to me. That it's built for python data stack on top is the icing on the cake.

davidcbc 5y ago

It seems like an interesting project, but tying it to the Reddit garbage makes it hard to take seriously.

mnahkies 5y ago
I think this is unfair. I read it as a tongue in check nod to the Reddit craze, but don't think it should change your opinion of the project itself
- davidcbc 5y ago
  I mean, if it was some kind of open source medical software that tried to play into the essential oils nonsense I would feel the same way. If you want to be a legitimate product don't associate yourself with the kooks
  - random3455699 5y ago
    Reddit's movement is organic. It may be silly, it may be misguided, it may be doing more harm than good, but people are uniting against institutions that have been taking advantage of little guys. If you are disgusted by the predatory nature of the financial system that monetizes information asymmetry, why not join the movement and help leveling the playing field? There is strength in numbers.
    - davidcbc 5y ago
      Because I think it's gonna end with a lot of people losing money they can't afford to lose.
      - sexy_year 5y ago
        I think most of the people underestimate the Reddit crowd. If you scroll through the reddit posts, 9 out of 10 are shit posts. But that other one is actually really good DD, by retail traders with 9-5 jobs that go a long way to understand what's going on under the hood. Not conspiracy theories, but actually backing up by data. There's a reason why HF are closing down due to shorting GME (https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-based-hedge-fund-that-bet-against-gamestop-shuts-down-ft-2021-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-based-hedge-fund-tha...). However, I agree with you guys that if we want to become more "legitimate" we need to consider a change in the name. Although our intention remains the same, to combine our efforts and leverage data to the average retail trader that can't afford a Bloomberg terminal, or even a paid subscription to another SW.

EMM_386 5y ago

The emoji for "diamond hands" is wrong. It puts the hands before the diamond. This makes me seriously question the whole project. I'm only half-joking ... after all, this is supposed to be targeted towards this demographic. Perhaps I should just do a pull request.

nindalf 5y ago

Looks like a fantastic project. ~~@dang could we get a simpler title like “Gamestonk Terminal - a FOSS alternative to Bloomberg Terminal”~~

sexy_year 5y ago
Love it. Just changed the "about" on the repo to that. Thanks! https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal

adeelk93 5y ago

This is a very interesting project, but you need to stop likening it to a Bloomberg terminal. By doing so, it comes off as a letdown by doing so little, rather than being impressive for doing so much with open source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260019 I looked through the features to see if my impression was wrong now, but seeing a new feature called Government that didn’t even acknowledge Treasuries has confirmed the weakness of this comparison.

random3455699 5y ago
https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/main/gamestonk_terminal/economy https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/...
- 1996 5y ago
  Exactly: features will be coming. It just takes time for free software to match commercial offering at first, but eventually it surpasses them (too many example to list) for 90% of the uses. If it let me cancel my Bloomberg subscription, why not? All I want is reddit + twitter firehose sentiment mining, accurate plot of basic (EURUSD, wood futures) and not so basic (VIX) things. I do not need to keep track of cargo ships on a map.
  - adeelk93 5y ago
    That sounds like great free software. But again, to quote from that thread a few months ago: The only thing that this shares with the bloomberg terminal is that it can do equities and is on a terminal. That above Gamestonk Economy page showing how you can pull `dgs5` from FRED, is basically unrelated to the `GOVT` functionality on Bloomberg. You have to understand, quoting an index is a whole other league from pricing information on individual bonds; anyone can do the former, but Bloomberg does the latter.
sexy_year 5y ago
I agree with you. The reason why we still link it to Bloomberg is because of the vision we have, not the current state of the project. Kind of similar to a self-driving startup mentioning that they will become a Tesla - It's not true, but you get the idea and concept. I made the repo open-source first at the end of February, given that we are only 3 devs (2 adding features and 1 dev ops) all with full-time jobs, there's only so much we can get our hands on. I don't have access to Bloomberg Terminal. But I'm pretty confident that there are features that we've got that Bloomberg doesn't. E.g. we have a screener for stocks that can be specified by our user base and made available by everyone (https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/main/gamestonk_terminal/screener/presets https://github.com/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal/tree/...). This is what having an open-source project can bring, combining collective knowledge of the community.

mylons 5y ago

cool stuff, but why do you need anaconda AND poetry to install? shouldn’t one be sufficient?

random3455699 5y ago
Anaconda for Windows and ML support and poetry for dependency management.
- sexy_year 5y ago
  Anaconda is more because it makes it easier to install python. A lot of our users have never coded before, and we found that installing python through Anaconda seemed the best option.
- mylons 5y ago
  hm, if i were doing this on windows i’d be using the WSL, but i guess it’s personal preference
  - random3455699 5y ago
    WSL is still evolving, although very promising. Browser and UI (displaying charts) integration is not great with WSL. Perhaps one day.
    - mylons 5y ago
      you’re not wrong about the graphs, but saving to a file is possible

siproprio 5y ago

It's a very promising project. Unfortunately, I was not able to successfully install it following the Getting Started install instructions.

fouc 5y ago

I actually really enjoy this sort of text-based Menu & Query interface, it makes it easy to discover & easy to remember command combinations! I wish more CLI apps offered this type of interface. Does anyone know if there's a specific name for this type of interface? (Like fdisk in linux)

jewel 5y ago
I call that a "gnu readline" interface. I suppose you could also call it a "zork" interface, especially if there is a lot of state that can be navigated. Compare with "curses" for an ascii-art gui like alsamixer.