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Show HN: Feather – 90 percent of Bloomberg terminal, for 5 percent of the price
Hey,
Wanted to share what my friend and I built — Feather. It provides investors with all imaginable financial data, without breaking the bank. Effectively 90 percent of the Bloomberg Terminal, at 5 percent of the price.
We just opened sign ups for early access — all you need to sign up is your email address. We’ll open access to the software in order of sign ups, and we’d love to have you onboard.
Check it out!
https://try-feather.com https://try-feather.com
- mattfrommars 4y agoLooks great. Basic question, how are you able to verify the data that Bloomberg Terminal provides is what you offer without breaking the bank? I am making a guess here because the data they provide to their customer validates their price tag. What is that 10% that Bloomberg is able to charge their customer the premium price tag?
- akrai 4y agoThank you! We get a lot of data directly from the SEC and international regulators, which of course is very reliable. We'll also have a data validation team as we grow -- our goal is to have 100 percent accurate data, 100 percent of the time. Bloomberg does stuff like mapping the location of every oil barge in the world in real time. That is great if you are an active oil trader making trades by the second, but will you need that as an equities investor in public markets? Highly likely, the answer is no. So, we cut out the stuff you don't need, and focus intensely on providing the best possible information that you do need, at a price that's accessible to everybody. Thanks for the feedback, and please don't hesitate to ask any further questions!
- TruffleLabs 4y ago"our goal is to have 100 percent accurate data, 100 percent of the time." Good to have a goal... how are you verifying to know you reached that goal? Reality check: if there are humans involved in any part of the process then that goal is not possible. Are there metrics on data validation that would be more meaningful and not exceed your budgets?
- 300bps 4y agoRespectfully, you are making very bold claims about your coverage of Bloomberg data and it seems like you don’t have a handle on the actual scope of what data Bloomberg provides. From a brief review of your website it seems like you have less than 1% of the data that Bloomberg provides on their terminal. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but… I used to do computer work for an upstart carpet cleaning solution company. They made bold claims about their product vs the established competitor. Five years later my customer still had copies of the checks they had to write to the established competitor as settlement of false advertising accusations hanging framed on their wall. The lawsuit and the settlement almost drove them out of business.
- yuppie_scum 4y agoI always wondered what the secret sauce is that Bloomberg has that’s so sticky, aside from force of habit and hesitance to change.
- akrai 4y agoFor institutions, Bloomberg has depth of relationships and frankly, maintaining the status quo tends to be low-risk, and therefore preferred, for management. For retail traders, independent investment managers, etc., it makes no sense to pay $25,000 per year for data you can get with us for $99 per month. We're excited to bring this to market with Feather!
- grenoire 4y agoHow about the added value of the chatrooms, which is a favourite whenever I talk to people using the terminals?
- akrai 4y agoYep, that's a fair point. We'll be building interactive communities as well. We expect our community to have many well-informed investors, and therefore expect the conversation to be value-add to everybody using Feather.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoI mean here chat won't be as useful. The point with that chat is not the chat, it is the access to people who can spend 25k. Here you will only get normies who have nothing special to add.
- sterlinm 4y agoHonestly, I’m skeptical that Bloomberg chat is really going to add much value to a random individual who springs for a Bloomberg terminal. If you’re a bond trader at some bank and all the other bond traders are chatting on Bloomberg, you’re missing out. But they’re not going to chat with me even if I got myself a Bloomberg terminal.
- akrai 4y agoAlso, if anybody would like an in-advance product demo, please don't hesitate to reach out at ash@try-feather.com and I'll walk you through it :)
- ajaimk 4y agoWhat’s the missing 10%?
- akrai 4y agoStuff like mapping the location of oil barges in real time, or executing $10 billion trades in real-time. If you're not an oil trader making trades by the second or managing a $50 billion endowment or hedge fund, do you need to pay $25,000 for this? Highly likely, the answer is no. That's where we come in -- we provide what you do need, at a price that doesn't break the bank.
- kionce 4y agoNews and analysis are probably in the 10%
- adra 4y agoThey almost certainly don't have messaging (with most investors), which is a huge reason (and facilitator) of direct trades, so I don't see how they can get around this unless Bloomberg and Refinitiv have open APIs for this.
- akrai 4y agoDo have analyst price targets and consensus estimates for financials, and will have sell side analysis as an option within 12 months.
- kionce 4y agoWay to go man - do you have relationships with the research departments on the sell side?
- siracguy 4y agoAs an advanced(!) retail trader, this looks very interesting. I haven't signed up yet. Looking at your pricing structure, I don't quite understand - does the free tier mean that once you look at five pages of data, your free usage is over? Or does it refer to being able to create five custom data pages, and then payment if you go over? If it's the former, I think it would be helpful to have some sort of trial period where you can use the site. I don't want to use up my "five free pages" just clicking around to see what is there. As an aside, Koyfin has some similar functionality, perhaps not with as much data, and they have a free tier where you can build some custom pages (e.g. watchlists). The paid tier starts if you want more of those.
- akrai 4y ago5 pages of data per month, correct. Free tier is primarily to explore what we can do for you. Trial period idea makes sense, let us get further feedback and we can do that instead of a free-forever, but restricted, tier. Thoughts, HN community? Koyfin has had to shut itself down during market hours because they don't have the money to maintain uptime. We provide 100 percent uptime, 100 percent of the time. With us, you can count on your data being available, whenever you need it.
- dewey 4y ago> We provide 100 percent uptime, 100 percent of the time. I know what you mean in relation to that point, but 100% uptime isn't realistic so I'd be careful with calling it that. There's a reason Amazon and other big companies only provide several nines of uptime guarantees.
- akrai 4y agoFair
- thestepafter 4y agoIn my opinion you should be careful claiming 100% uptime since it feels that you are just throwing numbers out there. Especially with other comments in this thread stating that this doesn’t appear to be 90% of data.
- iav 4y agoAs someone who’s used Bloomberg in a professional setting, this is more like 1% of the data for 5% of the cost. This doesn’t even have an Excel plugin or any other API. For people looking for an alternative, I recommend Refinitiv Eikon, which actually is 90% of the data for 50% of the cost and it has a native Python API and no rate limits on data.
- jleahy 4y agoCapital IQ is also pretty good, although not as good as Bloomberg.
- akrai 4y agoCapitalIQ is a good product, but it costs about $12,000 per year. We aim to have similar, if not better, functionality, for $99 per month -- a 90 percent cost saving.
- halfdan 4y agoThat's a bold claim. Care to share how you aim to achieve that with similar data quality?
- ykpramodh 4y agoEx CapIq employee here. CapIQ has a massive 3000+ team in India to clean data when I was there.
- jleahy 4y agoIf you are getting earnings from SEC then you’ll have US only and it’ll arrive a week after they are announced (unless you have a human listen to the earnings call and input them).
- akrai 4y agoThanks for the feedback. We built this primarily for people who will use it to make informed trades, not plug it into code. That said, we willl have Excel integration upon launch, and will be adding API accessibility over time. Refinitiv is a good option if you feel the $12,500 cost per year makes sense for you. We're building this for people for whom it doesn't.
- neximo64 4y agoAs a user of the Bloomberg, you've not even got 0.1% of the stuff they've got. The data set it looks like you have available is the standard SEC database, which is available freely anyway.
- 300bps 4y ago90% of Bloomberg terminal or 90% of the data available on a Bloomberg terminal? Bloomberg terminals have tons of apps, messaging, trading, APIs and so much more. Even with your data how do you compensate for not having access to Bloomberg entity IDs for issuers? I have no idea who you are but I’m rooting for you. I literally hate Bloomberg (the company) and have done everything I can in my career to stop using their services (Bloomberg Server API, Bloomberg Data License, etc) but getting rid of terminals is probably harder than repealing the second amendment.
- treyfitty 4y agoThis isn’t 90% of Bloomberg at all. Bloombergs value is provided through combining the data for you, and getting you that data the instant it’s published. There’s also value in the network effects via chat and Craigslist like marketplace for traders.
- jonp888 4y agoLooking at it, it appears to cover only equities and ignores all other financial products, which renders the "90%" claim risible. To claim that a good example of the other 10% is the location of oil tankers is either deliberately misleading or highly misinformed. I don't doubt you've put some effort into making a good platform, but anyone can make a deal with some exchanges to get their trade feed. Fixed Income products are Bloomberg's main strength, and in that world there are no shortcuts - you have to get as many bond traders as possible to send you their pricing. Bloomberg prices millions of fixed income products based on thousands of sources. Not to mention that a lot of the bond trading itself happens via the Bloomberg messagaing system.
- akrai 4y agoWe do plan to add fixed income, as well as other asset classes, in the next 12-18 months, just to be clear. Hopefully that clears up any doubts! We're also building this for the retail trader and are focused accordingly :)
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y agoSeems like you're missing foreign exchange and commodities too? How about options trading? I get access to all that via Interactive Brokers. Bloomberg at work also has economic data.
- archsurface 4y agoUS only?
- akrai 4y agoWill have international securities shortly
- Closi 4y agoDoes it have realtime market data?
- akrai 4y agoYes
- mwcampbell 4y agoJust curious, what's the tech stack?
- rahimnathwani 4y agoGetting a 500 error after submitting the sign up form.
- akrai 4y agoShould be fixed, got lots more traffic than expected and have now patched. Please use an email address with one of the major email providers for it to validate :)
- rahimnathwani 4y agoI just tried again. Same error. My domain's mail is hosted on Google, which is of the major email providers.
- akrai 4y agoCheck now? Thanks for your cooperation :)
- rahimnathwani 4y ago706 people ahead of me
- akrai 4y agoGlad to have you onboard, and please share -- you both get $100 credit, and more shares leads to earlier access!
- t_mann 4y agoA lot of comments seem to (correctly) focus on the fact that this does not appear to cover anywhere near 90% of Bloomberg's data. So I'd just like to throw out that this still looks really useful! Just not sure who'd be paying $99/month for that, as a retail trader it's really hard to quantify your personal ROI for such data (that is freely available anyway). But good luck to you!
- pixelmonkey 4y agoHow different is this from YCharts? I was always fascinated by YCharts business model. (Update: based on this, looks like it's quite a bit cheaper at the entry level, for starters -- https://www.g2.com/products/ycharts/pricing https://www.g2.com/products/ycharts/pricing ...)
- akrai 4y agoHave a lot of respect for YCharts. Yes, we are significantly less expensive, and focused on providing a massive depth of data on virtually any company you can think of, including raw numbers going back decades.
- rawicki 4y agoIt would be a great idea for you to buy Bloomberg and Eikon and actually play with them before making the 90% claim. From cheaper alternatives, how does it compare to TradingView? I use it and I like it - I don’t miss any data on equities, but economy data is quite limited - it has series from FRED so for example US employment or very basic mortgages data but no more good sources.
- sterlinm 4y agoFWIW, I think the comparison with Bloomberg is a bit of a distraction. It seems unlikely that you can live up to that 90% claim, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good product or good value. It looks like you’re targeting a different market than Bloomberg users. I took a quick look at your site and found the framing there much more compelling than the direct dig at Bloomberg here. Not a marketer though, so what do I know. Good luck!
- stuckonempty 4y agoWhat’s the time delay on data refreshes compared to the market?
- jack_childs 4y agohow does this differ (aside from cost) from the free and open source OpenBB terminal? https://openbb.co/ https://openbb.co/
- jmcgough 4y agoPart of Bloomberg's value is, counterintuitively, because it's so expensive. This limits the user network to people who can afford it, typically professional traders at major firms.
- beginning_end 4y agoIMO Portfolio123 is the best option for nonprofessionals.
- yareally 4y agoHow does it compare to something like Tradytics or Trend Spider? I've been a subscriber to the former for over a year + Trading View for charting. https://tradytics.com/ https://tradytics.com/ https://trendspider.com/ https://trendspider.com/ https://www.tradingview.com/ https://www.tradingview.com/
- akrai 4y agoA bunch of software offers good technical analysis based on charts in the present moment. But if you want to find the fundamental data of any imaginable company -- income statements, operating ratios (eg. Return on Capital), or even what analysts are saying -- going back decades, at a reasonable price, this is your solution.
- noam_compsci 4y agoDo you provide real time stock price data?
- akrai 4y agoYes
- italicbold 4y agoFYI, exchange subscriptions and data are charged on top of the Bloomberg subscription. You are paying for a lot more than just data, its all the tooling on top of it.
- snarkypixel 4y agoReally cool, congrats for the launch
- akrai 4y agoThank you!
- alphabettsy 4y agoThis seems comparable to something like Benzinga Pro but seems to have less features.
- dmarchand90 4y agoI do not like the claim of 1.1 billion points of data. This is meaningless. For me, this says a few GBs of data which isn't that impressive. I'm not sure how you came up with this number, but you could, for example, have a record of the stock price of 1000 companies for every minute for the last 20 years that would get you there. I have no experience in marketing so maybe average customers don't worry about this. But, to me, it seems like a red flag as your spinning something average into something extraordinary.
- Komodai 4y agoVERY misleading title.
- Youden 4y agoYou really need to ditch the Bloomberg terminal comparison. People who know what the Bloomberg Terminal is are going to be disappointed by your product because it's not even remotely in the same realm of capability. People who don't know what it is (which I'm guessing is actually your target audience) are either not going to understand, or will learn, then be disappointed that what you offer doesn't come close. If you just ditch that comparison and describe honestly, clearly and precisely what your product does (apparently, provide basic financial data), everyone should be happy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- helsinki 4y agoCompletely agreed. As a Bb Terminal subscriber, I am insulted by this product’s tagline, because it is false advertising.
- kjs3 4y agoEffectively 90 percent of the Bloomberg Terminal, at 5 percent of the price. Great example of the 'fake it till you make it' ethos. If you're gonna lie, lie big.
- generallyaware 4y agoDo you mean to say this offers 90% of the value of Bloomberg terminal, or 90% of the features? I think I understand what it is you mean, perhaps there’s a better way to word it? I took a look at your website and actually see a lot of value in this product for the average investor.. who isn’t making use of Bloomberg’s more institutional oriented features eg fixed income. Personally interested. Good luck with the launch!
- akrai 4y agoRight, it provides what most retail traders are looking for in order to improve their investment performance, at a price most retail traders can afford. We're not trying to end Bloomberg, and institutional traders of fixed income, forex, or commodities are not our focus at this time -- we're focused on building what is truly valuable, and improves the investment performance of, retail traders.
- bernardv 4y agoThis is essentially re-packaged public equities data. Not at all comparable to what a Bloomberg Anywhere or terminal subscription offers. So, right off the bat, your marketing line is going to push your target customers away. And as others point out, data provenance and data quality are a pre-requisite to anyone seriously considering anything alongside Bloomberg, let alone as a substitute. On the plus side, I bet it likely doesn’t have that prehistorical pre-windows, stone-age Bloomberg UI.
- easytiger 4y agoDo you have any background in financial software services? Your use of language and execution here tells me you don't understand the business at all > Great data shouldn’t cost $25,000 per year. Now, it doesn’t. Feather offers all the financial data necessary to boost your investment performance, for only $99 per month. That’s 95 percent less than any alternative. In simple parlance that's false advertising because this isn't remotely "an alternative"
- marban 4y agoAnd for news: https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com
- akrai 4y agoWe have real-time news integrated on Feather.
- solarkraft 4y agoAbout the Bloomberg comparison: It has certainly attracted attention on HN, so it wasn't pointless. I might be somewhat close to your target demographic and personally have a vague notion of the Bloomberg terminal as a thing you use for high-profile trading, not much more, so I can't do anything with the 90%. I would also think that you're targeting the same people who'd otherwise use one, so not me. What might catch me (without offending people who know more about the terminal) would be something like "The [equivalent of a] Bloomberg terminal for [your target audience]".
- akrai 4y agoThanks for this well thought out reply. This makes a lot of sense -- really appreciate the constructiveness!
- frozencell 4y agoCan we use Feather to know the exact current and historic shareholding table of a company?
- akrai 4y agoAs far as funds, institutions, and major individuals are concerned, yes. For each person owning, say, $10,000 of stock, no -- for practicality and privacy reasons.
- frozencell 4y agoSo for example, we can check the marginal shareholding of Tencent or Electronic Arts?
- akrai 4y agoRight, institutional shareholders and major individual shareholders.