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OpenBB wants to be an open source challenger to Bloomberg Terminal

237 points by alexrustic 5y ago

Vaslo 5y ago
While large banks have the capital and resources to invest in Bloomberg terminals, even large company treasury teams have a hard time justifying the expense. In my old company, the treasury department just paid for one terminal and some analyst got stuck pulling anything and everything for the entire company. It was less expensive then buying additional terminals. Plus the analyst was a fixed cost via his salary anyway, why not just work him more. /s
- h1srf 5y ago
  AFAIK that's pretty much 100% against the license agreement. Data pulled from the terminal is only supposed to be shared with other BBG subscribers. They have more expensive offerings that allow non-subscriber use of data. I have been through audits where we prove that no non-terminal user is receiving data that we pull.
tomatowurst 5y ago
if it was possible to challenge Bloomberg, many wallstreet companies, banks, hedge funds would've done it already. the fact is they remain a moat. horrible ui but fast news reporters that the industry relies on. this is not something open source can fix (never was the issue), it is about hiring dozens of financial journalists who quickly deliver news
- qznc 5y ago
  Maybe they can be reduced to a news company? Remove the tool “terminal” essentially.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    Note that the terminal typically shows news headlines and stories before they are posted to the public internet. As long as Bloomberg publishes their own articles that "move markets" there will be value in being able to see those articles before the rest of the world.
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  BBG is huge as a trading platform. Not sure these days news is a very relevant part. Certainly, in my trading days data and trading were far more important to me on BBG.
djtango 5y ago
Not a terminal user but is Twitter the actual competitor to BBT? When it comes to real-time news, I feel like Twitter is up there for fastest source...
- eurusd 5y ago
  news are only a small part of BB Also, News are highly filtered and considered maximal quality, from best news agencies across the world including BB itself "News" also contains all companies corporate news, results and also technical ones such as corporate actions (dividends, dividends forecast, etc). twitter is not really a competitor here
- asoneth 5y ago
  Definitely agreed, but it's worth pointing out that they're not mutually exclusive. There are a lot of tools on the Terminal that integrate Twitter sources and can track and analyze commentary.
fgh 5y ago
I don't really see the advantage over Bloomberg or Refinitiv. If I would really want to use Python within the application, there is already Refinitiv's codebook (Jupyter within Eikon). Both Bloomberg and Refinitiv are also offering an API (or too many APIs actually) and I don't see that many users of the terminal or Eikon would like to or have the resources to actually develop or maintain a fork of the application.
- postpawl 5y ago
  It probably won’t be nearly as expensive as a Bloomberg terminal?
  - fgh 5y ago
    Well, if the sources of financial data will remain to be AlphaVantage and Reddit, yes, but as soon as they would get the really interesting data, I don't think they could keep the prices low. Even only access to one IBOR from the administrator can cost you a lot.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > It probably won’t be nearly as expensive as a Bloomberg terminal? Bloomberg is not expensive. It costs a lot of money, but that doesn't make it expensive (it's 100% worth it). The issue is that IB (Bloomberg chat) has become so integral to the operations of many financial institutions that people end up subscribing just for that (i.e. sales, MO/BO, etc) and don't use much else. But if you're an analyst/trader/PM/RM it's peanuts for the core tool that you will spend most of your day inside or connected to.
- pid-1 5y ago
  Although Bloomberg does offer APIs, you often need very expensive licensing to feed their data into services automatically. Also their SDKs are complete rubbish.
- ZeroCool2u 5y ago
  The Bloomberg API’s I’ve worked with were… really not great. At one point our Bloomberg rep started talking up their new “REST API” and how excellent it was. Well I made the mistake of saying I’d give it a shot. Turns out each request for data didn’t return the data. It returned another URL with your request that you would then have to poll. This URL was like a multicast feed and would send out messages about the data that everyone would request and you would have to ignore and filter out messages that didn’t match your request ID. At some point you’d get a message that did match and then it might tell you that the data is unavailable or something was wrong in your request or that you can get your data now. But it would be in this insane proprietary format and you’d have to write your own parser to parse it line by line and get into something resembling a CSV. This was marketed as the easy to use API for data scientists as well. We didn’t purchase access after the trial ended. For personal work I just use Polygon.io now.
lordnacho 5y ago
Lapsed Bloomberg terminal user here. I used it to trade everything under the sun, as well as read the news, and communicate with counterparties. Good luck to these guys, I do think it's a market that needs more entrants. But it's quite an uphill struggle. The thing about Bloomberg is the completeness. Not only do they offer all data on all exchanges plus OTC, they've done it by partnerships with a huge range of players. Very hard to get in on, you need an army of bizdev to maintain this. I was lucky enough to work across asset classes. Their data plus into tools that each kind of user needs. Volatility surfaces, bond pricers, currency forward calculators, credit default information. That's a lot of spreadsheets that you as a user won't have to write yourself. Then they have basically a whole newspaper, of pretty high quality. And then they have an approved chat function. This is not a technically difficult thing, but again you need every compliance department to approve use. They even have a legal arm where they gather legal news, I never used it but it sounds huge as well. And restaurant reviews. I used to joke that they had a dating site for users too, but it would not surprise me if that were true. All that for only 2k a month. Consider your average user on Bloomberg might be on hundreds of thousands total comp, or a team with that comp would share one.
- alephnan 5y ago
  Reminds me of Emacs being an entire OS
- cm2187 5y ago
  Not the least because most of those data sources require a license. Also they have huge amount of economic data, company financials, all somewhat normalised. That’s costly to maintain as I presume it comes from hundreds of different sources. Because these things break all the time. Broken feeds with wrong prices get sent, which require to reload the history when it gets corrected. A lot of google finance price feeds were broken and stayed broken for months They also integrate with trading desks, for instance who send bond pricing runs to their clients via bloomberg. The more banks you are client of, the more reliable your prices in bbg. There also have quasi proprietary data, like the key terms of pretty much every bond issued in the world, that the issuers or book runners typically double check when they issue a new one. They create generic time series of on the run bond benchmarks, n-th future (which switched automatically when the future rolls), etc. I am all for competition but agree, steep hill.
28304283409234 5y ago
Open Bulletin Board wants what now? Oh, other openbb. Gosh I'm old.
jasfi 5y ago
I remember seeing this when it first came out. A lot of people were really excited about the idea, and now I see they have funding. At the end of the day, though, it's all about results. Are people making profits from this terminal's features? My own project is an algo trading system (crypto only for now), with a UI that lets you define your rules easily: https://tradecast.one https://tradecast.one.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I thought one of the primary benefits of the Bloomberg Terminal was the newsfeed / updated data they can provide? Can an opensource competitor produce the same quality and timely data? If the trading AI was accurate and with a high degree of success that would be the product and there would be offers for millions if not more. Of course the people making it could run it themselves and make lots of money When it comes to the "AI" to help traders if this worked reliably there would be
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  Not sure that is true in terms of the relevance of the newsfeed. Bloomberg is large trading platform, too. Data these days comes from many places already, so Bloomberg is one of many sources a large bank would use.
jdrc 5y ago
i can see this working. there's little excuse to not have financial data that is open and in real time in this day, other than profiteering.
- cyral 5y ago
  The data itself is not open as it is heavily regulated by the data sources (the exchanges). Many people would rightfully think that stock data is free, given that you can look it up from various sources yourself. However it costs upwards of ~$100k/yr to get data for a single market (stocks, options, futures, etc). Then you have to consider that many of these are actually multiple sources in disguise. For example, if they wanted to add index data, they would be paying those fees to NASDAQ, FTSE Russell, CBOE, and every other somewhat important index company. It's a huge amount of work for compliance as well, to make sure the data you provide isn't being re-distributed and that you are classifying each user correctly (regular people vs finance professionals pay vastly different rates). I'm not even sure if they are aware of this as their current data source is scraping Yahoo Finance with the yFinance python package.
Havoc 5y ago
Name of the game here seems to be quality and breadth of data feeds, not the software itself. So don’t think being open source is a particularly useful trait here
- boringg 5y ago
  Agree with this 100%. Koyfin is a competitor and the software is good but i think the data is a challenge. Their getting there. I think how a competitor beats bloomberg is between them on core competency and price and then build out functionality. It sounds like bloomberg believes itself to be impregnable giving rise to blindspots. Good luck competitors.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > Koyfin is a competitor Koyfin is not a Bloomberg competitor. Refinitiv is the nearest competitor to Bloomberg. (But even they struggle, especially on Bonds). Second-tier competitors being CapitalIQ, and Factset. (But we are already at the point of quite noticeably not being at feature/data parity). Third-tier competitors are people like Infront.(By this point we've moved very far away from feature/data parity that its blatantly obvious). Then we get to the swamp level .... Stuff like Koyfin and similar are NOT competitors by any stretch of the imagination, not for Bloomberg and not for any of the Second/Third-tier vendors either.
catchclose8919 5y ago
side question, but... are there any known hacks of bloomberg terminals? seems like such a juicy target :P
vmception 5y ago
> By being open source, affordable, and highly customizable due to the usage of Python this is laughable right? why is the fawning over python not a thing that makes you chuckle? Is it because the computational finance community swarmed around python?
marban 5y ago
For news-only, there's https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com
imtemplain 5y ago
NickRandom 5y ago
I find it an interesting branch out from the original concept/submission of this in Feb 2021 as a "Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258773) Good luck - It is about time that Bloomberg Terminal had someone trying to eat their lunch.
- qsi 5y ago
  For as long as I've been in finance (measured in decades now, scarily enough) somebody's been trying to displace Bloomberg. They haven't succeeded.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    I guess when you use the word "disrupt" over and over, you end up believing its applicable in all industries.
  - apaprocki 5y ago
    For as long as I've been on HN (over a decade now, jeez) somebody's been evoking the name in their pitch thinking they have a good grasp of what our products actually do. I'll happily hat tip Betteridge and stake claim to Paprocki's law of HN subjects. It's an old adage that states: "Any product that says it is a Bloomberg Terminal replacement and will kill the Terminal -- isn't and won't."
eunos 5y ago
A crazy but dangerous way to market these challengers is that try to have it adapted in places that are either under US sanctions or risk under US sanctions. In those place they have all the incentive to ditch Bloomberg terminal. So places like China, Russia or Iran.
traceroute66 5y ago
Oh god, not yet another Bloomberg killer/challenger/$insert_word_of_your_choice There's an old adage "pick your battles". People need to wake up and smell the coffee that unless you've got deep pockets, you are never going to challenge Bloomberg (or Refinitiv or CaptialIQ or Factset). Why ? Because data. Because LOTS OF DATA. These companies have global coverage of data. They have global coverage of news. They have decades of historical data. They have live feeds from all global exchanges. They have traceable fundamental data for governments and corporates worldwide. They have presentation transcripts for governements and corporates worldwide. They have analytics tools. They have ... well, you get the gist ! Building and maintaining all those global data feeds costs $$$$$$$ and requires constant maintenance and babysitting to make sure its all functional. The same applies to integrating it all onto one platform to present to the end-user, more time, more money and lots of it. Bloomberg & Co cost 1-2k a month for a reason. It is simply not possible to deliver it for less than that price point. There is just so much stuff going on behind the scenes before it reaches your workstation. If you're telling me you can deliver it for 10's or 100's a month, then I can almost certainly guarantee you are cutting corners, lots of corners. So many corners that its pointless. So, frankly, unless some oligarch has given you a few Billion and told you to get on with it, you're not going to be "challenging" Bloomberg & co, not now, not ever.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > Because data. Because LOTS OF DATA. They are getting the data from third parties while the team is building the platform to use that data.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    and they have exclusive licensing agreements that makes it near impossible to get the full complete data. bloomberg terminal is not something that can be disrupted by open source, it would be similar to creating a google competitor by scraping alexa 1000 websites. it won't win them over.
    - sumedh 5y ago
NoMAD76 5y ago
They've lost me at "building a slick 21st century UI"
lesam 5y ago
IMO a core feature of the terminal is that it has a chat program that costs 20K per year to get on. That’s a pretty great filter for figuring out if someone is worth talking to about a 10MM dollar trade.
JackFr 5y ago
Entire article never mentions the word 'bond' or 'fixed income', which is basically the raison d'etre for the Bloomberg Terminal. You can trade stocks with a laptop and a brokerage account. You're not going to be able to trade bonds without a Bloomberg Terminal. The killer components are industry standard calculations and nearly universal bond data. There are some proprietary analytics, but they are honestly an add on. It's a market that should be ripe for disruption, because there are really a limited set of competitors, extracting near monopoly rents. At the same time open source only takes you so far because the data is the issue, and the issue is not market data, but reference data -- stuff that is mostly static, but potentially changing. It takes a lot of work to get that that right. (I worked for a fintech startup which went bankrupt because, among other reasons, we decided to create our own security master database, rather than buying it from a vendor. How hard could it be? Turns out very hard.)
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  interesting...can you not trade those assets in IBKR? Do you mean special data that Bloomberg has exclusive licensing to for bond traders?
  - RandomLensman 5y ago
    Not quite the same as BBG hosts a fair amount of single (e.g., Deutsche's Autobahn) and multi-dealer (e.g., for IR swaps) platforms. Focus is on banks and instis with commensurate sizes on these platforms (and some larger treasuries).
JustLurking2022 5y ago
Best of luck to them, but this one is dead on arrival. Symphony already tried to create an alternative with the backing of a number of the major investment banks, and failed miserably. As another commenter pointed out, the integrations are a huge part of the value proposition and would take a massive effort to recreate, assuming the data providers even find it worthwhile to engage. Then you need to run a brokerage, a ticker factory and a large news desk just to come close to parity. Heck, even other large companies like Refinitiv have trouble competing.
cyral 5y ago
Looking through their docs... The source for stock data is scraping Yahoo Finance or using IEX Cloud... The first is not legitimate and exchanges are not going to like that... and the second is only giving you roughly 2-3% of trading volume as IEX is a rather small exchange. I wonder how this will ever be competitive without actual data? Getting data from a single market (consolidated equity feed, options, futures, etc) can be upwards of $100k per year, not including the fees per-user (small for individuals, very large for any finance professional). These exchanges and organizations are also pretty serious about their intellectual property and will pursue apps that distribute it without a license. In addition to having a license for the data, you need a vendor to actually deliver the datafeed, which is a big cost in itself.
asoneth 5y ago
When people say something is a "Bloomberg Killer" they're usually only referring to a proper subset of what the terminal offers: Data -- It's not just exchange data but breaking news, earnings calls, shipping data, and any quantitative or qualitative information that might impact the price of a stock, bond, commodity, or currency. I'd imagine competitors could carve out domain-specific niches but it would be hard to match the breadth of information on the terminal. Functions -- Any one function or type of analysis may be replicatable but matching the sheer breadth would be challenging. Again, I'd imagine a competitor could carve out a domain-specific niche. Network -- Many financial professionals communicate and/or trade via the terminal. Network effects would make it hard to make inroads here, though a couple big institutions were (are?) trying with Symphony. Familiarity -- New functions and features get added but breaking existing workflows is rare. A professional who invests their time in learning the interface shouldn't have to re-learn a new interface every few years just to do the same thing. (There are unfortunately more exceptions to the rule than there used to be, but the UI churn is less than most enterprise software.)
mjhatrick 5y ago
Has anyone considered a BT style interface for something non-financial? Eg. setting up a dashboard style app thats designed for quick and efficient information retrieval from RSS, twitter etc without all the baggage of a webpage
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  Anything that's not RSS (such as Twitter) is going to be difficult because the platform is going to be constantly fighting you.
thawaya3113 5y ago
If you’re doing the kind of stuff that you would want a BB terminal for $20k/yr should be a drop in the bucket. Also, the cost of missing out on a trade or a piece of information or being delayed by a few seconds even once can be 100s of times that. And that’s even before we get to the excellent customer service where hitting a dedicated button on the keyboard will connect you to a human, who can then connect you, often without delay, to a financial expert, to the product owner of the app you’re using, or even to the developers. I guess this is a good thing to have for someone who cannot afford a BB (seems like there’s An opportunity for Bloomberg to offer a cut down intro version of their terminal), but it doesn’t seem to me this can target the BB terminals market.

237 points by alexrustic 5y ago

While large banks have the capital and resources to invest in Bloomberg terminals, even large company treasury teams have a hard time justifying the expense. In my old company, the treasury department just paid for one terminal and some analyst got stuck pulling anything and everything for the entire company. It was less expensive then buying additional terminals. Plus the analyst was a fixed cost via his salary anyway, why not just work him more. /s

h1srf 5y ago
AFAIK that's pretty much 100% against the license agreement. Data pulled from the terminal is only supposed to be shared with other BBG subscribers. They have more expensive offerings that allow non-subscriber use of data. I have been through audits where we prove that no non-terminal user is receiving data that we pull.

tomatowurst 5y ago

if it was possible to challenge Bloomberg, many wallstreet companies, banks, hedge funds would've done it already. the fact is they remain a moat. horrible ui but fast news reporters that the industry relies on. this is not something open source can fix (never was the issue), it is about hiring dozens of financial journalists who quickly deliver news

qznc 5y ago
Maybe they can be reduced to a news company? Remove the tool “terminal” essentially.
- asoneth 5y ago
  Note that the terminal typically shows news headlines and stories before they are posted to the public internet. As long as Bloomberg publishes their own articles that "move markets" there will be value in being able to see those articles before the rest of the world.
RandomLensman 5y ago
BBG is huge as a trading platform. Not sure these days news is a very relevant part. Certainly, in my trading days data and trading were far more important to me on BBG.

djtango 5y ago

Not a terminal user but is Twitter the actual competitor to BBT? When it comes to real-time news, I feel like Twitter is up there for fastest source...

eurusd 5y ago
news are only a small part of BB Also, News are highly filtered and considered maximal quality, from best news agencies across the world including BB itself "News" also contains all companies corporate news, results and also technical ones such as corporate actions (dividends, dividends forecast, etc). twitter is not really a competitor here
asoneth 5y ago
Definitely agreed, but it's worth pointing out that they're not mutually exclusive. There are a lot of tools on the Terminal that integrate Twitter sources and can track and analyze commentary.

fgh 5y ago

I don't really see the advantage over Bloomberg or Refinitiv. If I would really want to use Python within the application, there is already Refinitiv's codebook (Jupyter within Eikon). Both Bloomberg and Refinitiv are also offering an API (or too many APIs actually) and I don't see that many users of the terminal or Eikon would like to or have the resources to actually develop or maintain a fork of the application.

postpawl 5y ago
It probably won’t be nearly as expensive as a Bloomberg terminal?
- fgh 5y ago
  Well, if the sources of financial data will remain to be AlphaVantage and Reddit, yes, but as soon as they would get the really interesting data, I don't think they could keep the prices low. Even only access to one IBOR from the administrator can cost you a lot.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > It probably won’t be nearly as expensive as a Bloomberg terminal? Bloomberg is not expensive. It costs a lot of money, but that doesn't make it expensive (it's 100% worth it). The issue is that IB (Bloomberg chat) has become so integral to the operations of many financial institutions that people end up subscribing just for that (i.e. sales, MO/BO, etc) and don't use much else. But if you're an analyst/trader/PM/RM it's peanuts for the core tool that you will spend most of your day inside or connected to.
pid-1 5y ago
Although Bloomberg does offer APIs, you often need very expensive licensing to feed their data into services automatically. Also their SDKs are complete rubbish.
ZeroCool2u 5y ago
The Bloomberg API’s I’ve worked with were… really not great. At one point our Bloomberg rep started talking up their new “REST API” and how excellent it was. Well I made the mistake of saying I’d give it a shot. Turns out each request for data didn’t return the data. It returned another URL with your request that you would then have to poll. This URL was like a multicast feed and would send out messages about the data that everyone would request and you would have to ignore and filter out messages that didn’t match your request ID. At some point you’d get a message that did match and then it might tell you that the data is unavailable or something was wrong in your request or that you can get your data now. But it would be in this insane proprietary format and you’d have to write your own parser to parse it line by line and get into something resembling a CSV. This was marketed as the easy to use API for data scientists as well. We didn’t purchase access after the trial ended. For personal work I just use Polygon.io now.

lordnacho 5y ago

Lapsed Bloomberg terminal user here. I used it to trade everything under the sun, as well as read the news, and communicate with counterparties. Good luck to these guys, I do think it's a market that needs more entrants. But it's quite an uphill struggle. The thing about Bloomberg is the completeness. Not only do they offer all data on all exchanges plus OTC, they've done it by partnerships with a huge range of players. Very hard to get in on, you need an army of bizdev to maintain this. I was lucky enough to work across asset classes. Their data plus into tools that each kind of user needs. Volatility surfaces, bond pricers, currency forward calculators, credit default information. That's a lot of spreadsheets that you as a user won't have to write yourself. Then they have basically a whole newspaper, of pretty high quality. And then they have an approved chat function. This is not a technically difficult thing, but again you need every compliance department to approve use. They even have a legal arm where they gather legal news, I never used it but it sounds huge as well. And restaurant reviews. I used to joke that they had a dating site for users too, but it would not surprise me if that were true. All that for only 2k a month. Consider your average user on Bloomberg might be on hundreds of thousands total comp, or a team with that comp would share one.

alephnan 5y ago
Reminds me of Emacs being an entire OS
cm2187 5y ago
Not the least because most of those data sources require a license. Also they have huge amount of economic data, company financials, all somewhat normalised. That’s costly to maintain as I presume it comes from hundreds of different sources. Because these things break all the time. Broken feeds with wrong prices get sent, which require to reload the history when it gets corrected. A lot of google finance price feeds were broken and stayed broken for months They also integrate with trading desks, for instance who send bond pricing runs to their clients via bloomberg. The more banks you are client of, the more reliable your prices in bbg. There also have quasi proprietary data, like the key terms of pretty much every bond issued in the world, that the issuers or book runners typically double check when they issue a new one. They create generic time series of on the run bond benchmarks, n-th future (which switched automatically when the future rolls), etc. I am all for competition but agree, steep hill.

28304283409234 5y ago

Open Bulletin Board wants what now? Oh, other openbb. Gosh I'm old.

jasfi 5y ago

I remember seeing this when it first came out. A lot of people were really excited about the idea, and now I see they have funding. At the end of the day, though, it's all about results. Are people making profits from this terminal's features? My own project is an algo trading system (crypto only for now), with a UI that lets you define your rules easily: https://tradecast.one https://tradecast.one.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I thought one of the primary benefits of the Bloomberg Terminal was the newsfeed / updated data they can provide? Can an opensource competitor produce the same quality and timely data? If the trading AI was accurate and with a high degree of success that would be the product and there would be offers for millions if not more. Of course the people making it could run it themselves and make lots of money When it comes to the "AI" to help traders if this worked reliably there would be

RandomLensman 5y ago
Not sure that is true in terms of the relevance of the newsfeed. Bloomberg is large trading platform, too. Data these days comes from many places already, so Bloomberg is one of many sources a large bank would use.

jdrc 5y ago

i can see this working. there's little excuse to not have financial data that is open and in real time in this day, other than profiteering.

cyral 5y ago
The data itself is not open as it is heavily regulated by the data sources (the exchanges). Many people would rightfully think that stock data is free, given that you can look it up from various sources yourself. However it costs upwards of ~$100k/yr to get data for a single market (stocks, options, futures, etc). Then you have to consider that many of these are actually multiple sources in disguise. For example, if they wanted to add index data, they would be paying those fees to NASDAQ, FTSE Russell, CBOE, and every other somewhat important index company. It's a huge amount of work for compliance as well, to make sure the data you provide isn't being re-distributed and that you are classifying each user correctly (regular people vs finance professionals pay vastly different rates). I'm not even sure if they are aware of this as their current data source is scraping Yahoo Finance with the yFinance python package.

Havoc 5y ago

Name of the game here seems to be quality and breadth of data feeds, not the software itself. So don’t think being open source is a particularly useful trait here

boringg 5y ago
Agree with this 100%. Koyfin is a competitor and the software is good but i think the data is a challenge. Their getting there. I think how a competitor beats bloomberg is between them on core competency and price and then build out functionality. It sounds like bloomberg believes itself to be impregnable giving rise to blindspots. Good luck competitors.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > Koyfin is a competitor Koyfin is not a Bloomberg competitor. Refinitiv is the nearest competitor to Bloomberg. (But even they struggle, especially on Bonds). Second-tier competitors being CapitalIQ, and Factset. (But we are already at the point of quite noticeably not being at feature/data parity). Third-tier competitors are people like Infront.(By this point we've moved very far away from feature/data parity that its blatantly obvious). Then we get to the swamp level .... Stuff like Koyfin and similar are NOT competitors by any stretch of the imagination, not for Bloomberg and not for any of the Second/Third-tier vendors either.

catchclose8919 5y ago

side question, but... are there any known hacks of bloomberg terminals? seems like such a juicy target :P

vmception 5y ago

> By being open source, affordable, and highly customizable due to the usage of Python this is laughable right? why is the fawning over python not a thing that makes you chuckle? Is it because the computational finance community swarmed around python?

marban 5y ago

For news-only, there's https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com

imtemplain 5y ago

NickRandom 5y ago

I find it an interesting branch out from the original concept/submission of this in Feb 2021 as a "Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26258773) Good luck - It is about time that Bloomberg Terminal had someone trying to eat their lunch.

qsi 5y ago
For as long as I've been in finance (measured in decades now, scarily enough) somebody's been trying to displace Bloomberg. They haven't succeeded.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  I guess when you use the word "disrupt" over and over, you end up believing its applicable in all industries.
- apaprocki 5y ago
  For as long as I've been on HN (over a decade now, jeez) somebody's been evoking the name in their pitch thinking they have a good grasp of what our products actually do. I'll happily hat tip Betteridge and stake claim to Paprocki's law of HN subjects. It's an old adage that states: "Any product that says it is a Bloomberg Terminal replacement and will kill the Terminal -- isn't and won't."

eunos 5y ago

A crazy but dangerous way to market these challengers is that try to have it adapted in places that are either under US sanctions or risk under US sanctions. In those place they have all the incentive to ditch Bloomberg terminal. So places like China, Russia or Iran.

traceroute66 5y ago

Oh god, not yet another Bloomberg killer/challenger/$insert_word_of_your_choice There's an old adage "pick your battles". People need to wake up and smell the coffee that unless you've got deep pockets, you are never going to challenge Bloomberg (or Refinitiv or CaptialIQ or Factset). Why ? Because data. Because LOTS OF DATA. These companies have global coverage of data. They have global coverage of news. They have decades of historical data. They have live feeds from all global exchanges. They have traceable fundamental data for governments and corporates worldwide. They have presentation transcripts for governements and corporates worldwide. They have analytics tools. They have ... well, you get the gist ! Building and maintaining all those global data feeds costs $$$$$$$ and requires constant maintenance and babysitting to make sure its all functional. The same applies to integrating it all onto one platform to present to the end-user, more time, more money and lots of it. Bloomberg & Co cost 1-2k a month for a reason. It is simply not possible to deliver it for less than that price point. There is just so much stuff going on behind the scenes before it reaches your workstation. If you're telling me you can deliver it for 10's or 100's a month, then I can almost certainly guarantee you are cutting corners, lots of corners. So many corners that its pointless. So, frankly, unless some oligarch has given you a few Billion and told you to get on with it, you're not going to be "challenging" Bloomberg & co, not now, not ever.

sumedh 5y ago
> Because data. Because LOTS OF DATA. They are getting the data from third parties while the team is building the platform to use that data.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  and they have exclusive licensing agreements that makes it near impossible to get the full complete data. bloomberg terminal is not something that can be disrupted by open source, it would be similar to creating a google competitor by scraping alexa 1000 websites. it won't win them over.
  - sumedh 5y ago

NoMAD76 5y ago

They've lost me at "building a slick 21st century UI"

lesam 5y ago

IMO a core feature of the terminal is that it has a chat program that costs 20K per year to get on. That’s a pretty great filter for figuring out if someone is worth talking to about a 10MM dollar trade.

JackFr 5y ago

Entire article never mentions the word 'bond' or 'fixed income', which is basically the raison d'etre for the Bloomberg Terminal. You can trade stocks with a laptop and a brokerage account. You're not going to be able to trade bonds without a Bloomberg Terminal. The killer components are industry standard calculations and nearly universal bond data. There are some proprietary analytics, but they are honestly an add on. It's a market that should be ripe for disruption, because there are really a limited set of competitors, extracting near monopoly rents. At the same time open source only takes you so far because the data is the issue, and the issue is not market data, but reference data -- stuff that is mostly static, but potentially changing. It takes a lot of work to get that that right. (I worked for a fintech startup which went bankrupt because, among other reasons, we decided to create our own security master database, rather than buying it from a vendor. How hard could it be? Turns out very hard.)

tomatowurst 5y ago
interesting...can you not trade those assets in IBKR? Do you mean special data that Bloomberg has exclusive licensing to for bond traders?
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  Not quite the same as BBG hosts a fair amount of single (e.g., Deutsche's Autobahn) and multi-dealer (e.g., for IR swaps) platforms. Focus is on banks and instis with commensurate sizes on these platforms (and some larger treasuries).

JustLurking2022 5y ago

Best of luck to them, but this one is dead on arrival. Symphony already tried to create an alternative with the backing of a number of the major investment banks, and failed miserably. As another commenter pointed out, the integrations are a huge part of the value proposition and would take a massive effort to recreate, assuming the data providers even find it worthwhile to engage. Then you need to run a brokerage, a ticker factory and a large news desk just to come close to parity. Heck, even other large companies like Refinitiv have trouble competing.

cyral 5y ago

Looking through their docs... The source for stock data is scraping Yahoo Finance or using IEX Cloud... The first is not legitimate and exchanges are not going to like that... and the second is only giving you roughly 2-3% of trading volume as IEX is a rather small exchange. I wonder how this will ever be competitive without actual data? Getting data from a single market (consolidated equity feed, options, futures, etc) can be upwards of $100k per year, not including the fees per-user (small for individuals, very large for any finance professional). These exchanges and organizations are also pretty serious about their intellectual property and will pursue apps that distribute it without a license. In addition to having a license for the data, you need a vendor to actually deliver the datafeed, which is a big cost in itself.

asoneth 5y ago

When people say something is a "Bloomberg Killer" they're usually only referring to a proper subset of what the terminal offers: Data -- It's not just exchange data but breaking news, earnings calls, shipping data, and any quantitative or qualitative information that might impact the price of a stock, bond, commodity, or currency. I'd imagine competitors could carve out domain-specific niches but it would be hard to match the breadth of information on the terminal. Functions -- Any one function or type of analysis may be replicatable but matching the sheer breadth would be challenging. Again, I'd imagine a competitor could carve out a domain-specific niche. Network -- Many financial professionals communicate and/or trade via the terminal. Network effects would make it hard to make inroads here, though a couple big institutions were (are?) trying with Symphony. Familiarity -- New functions and features get added but breaking existing workflows is rare. A professional who invests their time in learning the interface shouldn't have to re-learn a new interface every few years just to do the same thing. (There are unfortunately more exceptions to the rule than there used to be, but the UI churn is less than most enterprise software.)

mjhatrick 5y ago

Has anyone considered a BT style interface for something non-financial? Eg. setting up a dashboard style app thats designed for quick and efficient information retrieval from RSS, twitter etc without all the baggage of a webpage

throwaway684936 5y ago
Anything that's not RSS (such as Twitter) is going to be difficult because the platform is going to be constantly fighting you.

thawaya3113 5y ago

If you’re doing the kind of stuff that you would want a BB terminal for $20k/yr should be a drop in the bucket. Also, the cost of missing out on a trade or a piece of information or being delayed by a few seconds even once can be 100s of times that. And that’s even before we get to the excellent customer service where hitting a dedicated button on the keyboard will connect you to a human, who can then connect you, often without delay, to a financial expert, to the product owner of the app you’re using, or even to the developers. I guess this is a good thing to have for someone who cannot afford a BB (seems like there’s An opportunity for Bloomberg to offer a cut down intro version of their terminal), but it doesn’t seem to me this can target the BB terminals market.