7 ms·

Bloomberg market data API made public for C++, .Net, Java, Perl

121 points by Netadmin 15y ago

marketmonkey 15y ago
This is great for small finance startups where previously the costs were astronomical. I'm certainly going to look at incorporating this in to livelystocks.com which could benefit from some realtime finance data.
- kokey 15y ago
  I haven't looked at the license yet, but I suspect it may have certain restrictions with regards to providing the data to others without becoming a paying customer.
- Maxious 15y ago
  I was initially very excited but once you read the details it's the spec and implementation of the API for a realtime market data messaging system that is public and MIT licenced (unlike Bloomberg's competitors) not any actual data sources. Presumably even if you want to test a new client implementation, you would need to have an account with Bloomberg (the magazine article mentions "beta" markets but I'm guessing that doesn't mean in finance what it means to developers).
- chollida1 15y ago
  THere are alot of restrictions on what you can do with financial data in general. Typically it's tiered pricing model so it's: - at one rate for viewing internally at your company, - another rate if it's used for automated trading purposes -another, open your wallet and dump it out price if you want to redistribute the data to external viewers, ie put it up on a website.
brador 15y ago
Direct link: http://open.bloomberg.com/ http://open.bloomberg.com/ But why make the docs .pdf?!
- alexchamberlain 15y ago
  This is a massive step for Bloomberg; let's give them a chance to improve over time. One day they might make an appearance on GitHub...
  - apaprocki 15y ago
    Already working on it.. I wrote a Node.js module for the API which I am most likely putting on there soon :)
Permit 15y ago
Wow this looks pretty awesome. As a student who is interested in relating programming to finance, this definitely looks like it takes care of some barriers that were previously in place. I'm extremely excited to look into this.
- joshbaptiste 15y ago
  Then why not just learn with Interactive Brokers API, you get access to their TWS test system API which is great for learning purposes.
  - Permit 15y ago
    Thanks, I'll give that a look as well.
travisglines 15y ago
I'm not convinced that they're actually offering the data for free here. Merely the use of the API is now free (You used to have to actually purchase Bloomberg terminals/hardware to use it). I've emailed both of their contact addresses requesting more information, will edit this as soon as I get a response.
- brownegg 15y ago
  (Of course) the data won't be free. They don't get it for free--"tape" fees are a major source of exchange revenue. (Although it's possible some delayed feeds may be available, etc.)
  - chollida1 15y ago
    > They don't get it for free--"tape" fees are a major source of exchange revenue. This is the truth. It's pretty outrageous the prices the exchanges charge for real time data. Though to be fair they are pretty good about letting you pay for what you want. Most offer: - 15 minute delayed quotes, - real time top of book, - depth of book and the - raw fast data feed with not additions. Pick what you want.
    - apaprocki 15y ago
      Anecdote: I once asked how much it would cost if I enabled myself for realtime access to every exchange we offer and I was given the ballpark figure that it would cost the company $80k/year. Exchanges charge a lot.
      - chollida1 15y ago
        Hmm, that seems cheap :) TSX, NYSE, and NASDAQ are around $5000/month each for full depth of book.
- travisglines 15y ago
  Yeah I think in retrospect this comment was sort of silly. We all read this post hoping that they were giving away a real time free financial data API (that would be huge), but really that's how they make money. They just want to change their model a bit and have everyone able to access it easily by becoming a data API customer. It's probably a good move for them but I don't like the way they and the press covering this aren't mentioning that all it is is access to the same API as before without having to purchase the terminal now. (this is conjecture as I still haven't heard back) Edit ... their response that confirms it: Hello Travis, Thank you for your inquiry. The Open BLPAPI initiative is meant to present the API as a free-use technology, but the Bloomberg content and data services from Bloomberg are still licensed products. Our goal is to give you the freedom to develop applications using the API, and once subscribed to a licensed data service from Bloomberg you would be able to access the content. Regards, Bloomberg Open Market Data Initiative
shafqat 15y ago
If anyone wants licensed Bloomberg financial news content, we have that in our News API and can give to you guys at HN rates. Can be used for commercial use. We worked hard to get this agreement done with Bloomberg since we know a lot of finance startup could use this.
bigbird 15y ago
Note that ths is just an API - to use it you still need to be a subscriber, and nothing they offer is cheap. In the tradition of their Excel APIs, this doesn't even come close to giving automated access to their entire database. This API seems like a marketing tool designed to get people to build algorithmic applications around expensive real time feeds from Bloomberg.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  Is there an example of some data you need which isn't served over the API?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
omarchowdhury 15y ago
This reporter couldn't make the distinction between and open and free?
steve8918 15y ago
I'm guessing that previously Bloomberg either charged or didn't allow 3rd party access to their APIs so that you could develop your own apps on top of the datafeed. By making it open, it opens up the market for 3rd party tool developers to build apps that can access the Bloomberg feed data. To those that are complaining, I have a developer subscription to IQFeed, which charges a fee of around $70/month for delayed data, and I pay $300/yr, so Bloomberg offering it for free is pretty good. Too bad their data feed costs ~$1000/month.
- half_marathon 15y ago
  Does the cost depend on the volume of data accessed or is it just a fixed amount per month?
  - steve8918 15y ago
    The cost of what, IQFeed? For IQFeed it's a fixed amount per month. I have no idea on Bloomberg.
    - apaprocki 15y ago
      There is a monthly cost and also tiered, metered usage. Keep in mind this isn't just for accessing North American exchanges. Our data customers can access all data we have, from the 110+ countries we collect feeds from.
      - half_marathon 15y ago
        Thanks for the response. Can you give a pointer to the Bloomberg pricing info, to get an idea of the fixed + variable costs?
gducharme 15y ago
Having worked there, I can see that this is a very powerful move towards solidifying marketshare for then. They were drowning in complexity. Opening the API will allow them to acquire any small innovating startup at a fraction of the cost it would have taken them to develop inhouse.
- empirasign 15y ago
  maybe so, but Bloomberg is the dominant player in most of the markets it operates in. Perhaps with this initiative Bloomberg is looking to embrace new markets as some of their previous cash cows continue to struggle as debt markets can't seem to put 2008 behind them. Empirasign is a market data company whose focus is transaction prices for OTC MBS transactions. We currently license our market data to Bloomberg for internal use. Our raw data is a series of email messages, and the output is basically one big table whose key index is the Blomberg Ticker--which thanks to Open Symbology (bysm.bloomber.com) is license free. One new market that comes to mind for Bloomberg is online ad rates. If I were starting a new finance start-up today, I'd focus on gathering transaction prices for online ads, organize them into some form that made sense to finance types, and publish this data to Bloomberg via their API. Now you have two take-out bids: One in the tech space, and the other in the finance arena. Anyone interested in this, message us: info@empirasign.com.
salsayarroz 15y ago
They do not give away content, from their press release: "* Bloomberg is offering its programming interface (BLPAPI) under a free-use agreement. This does not apply to any content."
gersh 15y ago
What is the cheapest way to get the actual data? A number of years back, opentick had a pretty cheap API for getting market data. However, they have shutdown. Is there anyone out there with a good api, and relatively cheap data feed?
paperwork 15y ago
Bloomberg isn't offering this data for free. They can't offer full, real-time data for free. I'm surprised how many people on HN are interested in this. If you are looking for real-time feeds, the best vendor I've found is http://www.nanex.net/ http://www.nanex.net/ . They offer the whole feed, real-time, over the internet. Unfortunately you have to access it through their windows based dll. I can't understand why they don't have a native linux client...but they don't. A very interesting source of data is BATS. I believe you can get free data feeds from BATS. Since they are a very liquid exchange, in many instances their prices can be proxies for the full market. Unfortunately, you need industrial strength bandwidth to access that data (you can't just get it over the internet). I believe there is space in the market for another market data vendor. Use good compression to drastically reduce bandwidth (see nanex), provide diverse client APIs (NOT nanex), slowly start to aggregate feeds from international exchanges, provide intelligent routing (100 clients in china should not make 100 connections to a NYC data center, they should connect to a local node), offer limited access to no cost exchanges, etc. Unfortunately vendor agreements for exchanges are expensive enough that they are out of reach for bootstrapped operations.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  Vendor agreements are only part of it. We actually run one of the largest private networks in the world. There are huge fixed costs with just the physical logistics of the operation. On the data side, I was curious and checked.. The aggregate amount of incoming ticks/messages is upwards of 45 billion a day.
  - paperwork 15y ago
    You are right, bloomberg is obviously in a different league. I meant there is an opportunity to offer market data to a different set of clients. However, that is not to say that the size of bloomberg's infrastructure is the biggest obstacle to competing with it. Today there are technologies (nosql, HDFS, virtual clustures, etc.) which make it reasonable for ambitious engineers to think about competing with sections of bloomberg's business. Bloomberg does have an immense, non-technical, advantage because traders often love their terminals. From the outside, it looks like an ugly, mainframe age technology with weird commands and ancient looking charts. But boy is it ever useful :) Proficient BB users would make vim users proud.
tzhang 15y ago
Anyone know a service that provides easy access to historical income statements, balance sheet, and cash flow?
- danm 15y ago
  S&P Capital IQ -- http://www.capitaliq.com http://www.capitaliq.com Depends on your definition of easy I suppose, but they have a superior fundamentals database.
  - littlemerman 15y ago
    Looks like Capital IQ is already using Hadoop for their infrastructure. http://strataconf.com/strata2012/public/schedule/detail/22587 http://strataconf.com/strata2012/public/schedule/detail/2258...
- apaprocki 15y ago
  The Bloomberg API provides access to that information. The only "hard" part is paying for the subscription.
digitalboss 15y ago
Quick replies by Apaprocki is why the internet is so awesome right now.
jrockway 15y ago
My experience with using anything Reuters or Bloomberg is that you do not want their code anywhere near a critical system. It's poorly designed, poorly documented, low on features, hard to integrate, and incredibly expensive. Moving data from one place to another is a solved problem. But not if you are using RMDS. Then it's just a problem.
- gaius 15y ago
  What's your definition of "critical"? Because people have these plumbed into systems trading billions unattended...
- wglb 15y ago
  I can't speak for Reuters, but I have worked with two generations of Bloomberg data. One was a trading backfeed over TCP/IP that was pretty complicated to implement. For example, whenever my side crashed or exited, I had to call the NY contact to restart his server end. That was a pretty tricky, but once up it was quite steady. And it was attached to a very critical trading system. The second was a very rich set of all manner of indicative data--a superset of what you would imagine is behind the Terminal itself. This seemed to me to be a very cleanly specified and implemented system. And it was quite feature rich. I am not clear on what relationship this has with their current offering.
  - apaprocki 15y ago
    The first one sounds like some kind of custom FIX feed. That would be unrelated. The latter is essentially what was released today. The request/response mode is used for the indicative/historical retrieval and subscriptions are used for the realtime data.
dman 15y ago
Any way of using the api's in 'test' mode? Maybe have the methods return dummy / delayed data ? Or maybe have one instrument of each type available for free so that people can create mockups and test wrappers ?
- apaprocki 15y ago
  I know internally we have a way to do this (use static files to test subscriptions / static requests). I'll ask if that is available in the package already or if it can be added.
  - dman 15y ago
    Thanks Andrew. This is great work!

121 points by Netadmin 15y ago

This is great for small finance startups where previously the costs were astronomical. I'm certainly going to look at incorporating this in to livelystocks.com which could benefit from some realtime finance data.

kokey 15y ago
I haven't looked at the license yet, but I suspect it may have certain restrictions with regards to providing the data to others without becoming a paying customer.
Maxious 15y ago
I was initially very excited but once you read the details it's the spec and implementation of the API for a realtime market data messaging system that is public and MIT licenced (unlike Bloomberg's competitors) not any actual data sources. Presumably even if you want to test a new client implementation, you would need to have an account with Bloomberg (the magazine article mentions "beta" markets but I'm guessing that doesn't mean in finance what it means to developers).
chollida1 15y ago
THere are alot of restrictions on what you can do with financial data in general. Typically it's tiered pricing model so it's: - at one rate for viewing internally at your company, - another rate if it's used for automated trading purposes -another, open your wallet and dump it out price if you want to redistribute the data to external viewers, ie put it up on a website.

brador 15y ago

Direct link: http://open.bloomberg.com/ http://open.bloomberg.com/ But why make the docs .pdf?!

alexchamberlain 15y ago
This is a massive step for Bloomberg; let's give them a chance to improve over time. One day they might make an appearance on GitHub...
- apaprocki 15y ago
  Already working on it.. I wrote a Node.js module for the API which I am most likely putting on there soon :)

Permit 15y ago

Wow this looks pretty awesome. As a student who is interested in relating programming to finance, this definitely looks like it takes care of some barriers that were previously in place. I'm extremely excited to look into this.

joshbaptiste 15y ago
Then why not just learn with Interactive Brokers API, you get access to their TWS test system API which is great for learning purposes.
- Permit 15y ago
  Thanks, I'll give that a look as well.

travisglines 15y ago

I'm not convinced that they're actually offering the data for free here. Merely the use of the API is now free (You used to have to actually purchase Bloomberg terminals/hardware to use it). I've emailed both of their contact addresses requesting more information, will edit this as soon as I get a response.

brownegg 15y ago
(Of course) the data won't be free. They don't get it for free--"tape" fees are a major source of exchange revenue. (Although it's possible some delayed feeds may be available, etc.)
- chollida1 15y ago
  > They don't get it for free--"tape" fees are a major source of exchange revenue. This is the truth. It's pretty outrageous the prices the exchanges charge for real time data. Though to be fair they are pretty good about letting you pay for what you want. Most offer: - 15 minute delayed quotes, - real time top of book, - depth of book and the - raw fast data feed with not additions. Pick what you want.
  - apaprocki 15y ago
    Anecdote: I once asked how much it would cost if I enabled myself for realtime access to every exchange we offer and I was given the ballpark figure that it would cost the company $80k/year. Exchanges charge a lot.
    - chollida1 15y ago
      Hmm, that seems cheap :) TSX, NYSE, and NASDAQ are around $5000/month each for full depth of book.
travisglines 15y ago
Yeah I think in retrospect this comment was sort of silly. We all read this post hoping that they were giving away a real time free financial data API (that would be huge), but really that's how they make money. They just want to change their model a bit and have everyone able to access it easily by becoming a data API customer. It's probably a good move for them but I don't like the way they and the press covering this aren't mentioning that all it is is access to the same API as before without having to purchase the terminal now. (this is conjecture as I still haven't heard back) Edit ... their response that confirms it: Hello Travis, Thank you for your inquiry. The Open BLPAPI initiative is meant to present the API as a free-use technology, but the Bloomberg content and data services from Bloomberg are still licensed products. Our goal is to give you the freedom to develop applications using the API, and once subscribed to a licensed data service from Bloomberg you would be able to access the content. Regards, Bloomberg Open Market Data Initiative

shafqat 15y ago

If anyone wants licensed Bloomberg financial news content, we have that in our News API and can give to you guys at HN rates. Can be used for commercial use. We worked hard to get this agreement done with Bloomberg since we know a lot of finance startup could use this.

bigbird 15y ago

Note that ths is just an API - to use it you still need to be a subscriber, and nothing they offer is cheap. In the tradition of their Excel APIs, this doesn't even come close to giving automated access to their entire database. This API seems like a marketing tool designed to get people to build algorithmic applications around expensive real time feeds from Bloomberg.

apaprocki 15y ago
Is there an example of some data you need which isn't served over the API?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

omarchowdhury 15y ago

This reporter couldn't make the distinction between and open and free?

steve8918 15y ago

I'm guessing that previously Bloomberg either charged or didn't allow 3rd party access to their APIs so that you could develop your own apps on top of the datafeed. By making it open, it opens up the market for 3rd party tool developers to build apps that can access the Bloomberg feed data. To those that are complaining, I have a developer subscription to IQFeed, which charges a fee of around $70/month for delayed data, and I pay $300/yr, so Bloomberg offering it for free is pretty good. Too bad their data feed costs ~$1000/month.

half_marathon 15y ago
Does the cost depend on the volume of data accessed or is it just a fixed amount per month?
- steve8918 15y ago
  The cost of what, IQFeed? For IQFeed it's a fixed amount per month. I have no idea on Bloomberg.
  - apaprocki 15y ago
    There is a monthly cost and also tiered, metered usage. Keep in mind this isn't just for accessing North American exchanges. Our data customers can access all data we have, from the 110+ countries we collect feeds from.
    - half_marathon 15y ago
      Thanks for the response. Can you give a pointer to the Bloomberg pricing info, to get an idea of the fixed + variable costs?

gducharme 15y ago

Having worked there, I can see that this is a very powerful move towards solidifying marketshare for then. They were drowning in complexity. Opening the API will allow them to acquire any small innovating startup at a fraction of the cost it would have taken them to develop inhouse.

empirasign 15y ago
maybe so, but Bloomberg is the dominant player in most of the markets it operates in. Perhaps with this initiative Bloomberg is looking to embrace new markets as some of their previous cash cows continue to struggle as debt markets can't seem to put 2008 behind them. Empirasign is a market data company whose focus is transaction prices for OTC MBS transactions. We currently license our market data to Bloomberg for internal use. Our raw data is a series of email messages, and the output is basically one big table whose key index is the Blomberg Ticker--which thanks to Open Symbology (bysm.bloomber.com) is license free. One new market that comes to mind for Bloomberg is online ad rates. If I were starting a new finance start-up today, I'd focus on gathering transaction prices for online ads, organize them into some form that made sense to finance types, and publish this data to Bloomberg via their API. Now you have two take-out bids: One in the tech space, and the other in the finance arena. Anyone interested in this, message us: info@empirasign.com.

salsayarroz 15y ago

They do not give away content, from their press release: "* Bloomberg is offering its programming interface (BLPAPI) under a free-use agreement. This does not apply to any content."

gersh 15y ago

What is the cheapest way to get the actual data? A number of years back, opentick had a pretty cheap API for getting market data. However, they have shutdown. Is there anyone out there with a good api, and relatively cheap data feed?

paperwork 15y ago

Bloomberg isn't offering this data for free. They can't offer full, real-time data for free. I'm surprised how many people on HN are interested in this. If you are looking for real-time feeds, the best vendor I've found is http://www.nanex.net/ http://www.nanex.net/ . They offer the whole feed, real-time, over the internet. Unfortunately you have to access it through their windows based dll. I can't understand why they don't have a native linux client...but they don't. A very interesting source of data is BATS. I believe you can get free data feeds from BATS. Since they are a very liquid exchange, in many instances their prices can be proxies for the full market. Unfortunately, you need industrial strength bandwidth to access that data (you can't just get it over the internet). I believe there is space in the market for another market data vendor. Use good compression to drastically reduce bandwidth (see nanex), provide diverse client APIs (NOT nanex), slowly start to aggregate feeds from international exchanges, provide intelligent routing (100 clients in china should not make 100 connections to a NYC data center, they should connect to a local node), offer limited access to no cost exchanges, etc. Unfortunately vendor agreements for exchanges are expensive enough that they are out of reach for bootstrapped operations.

apaprocki 15y ago
Vendor agreements are only part of it. We actually run one of the largest private networks in the world. There are huge fixed costs with just the physical logistics of the operation. On the data side, I was curious and checked.. The aggregate amount of incoming ticks/messages is upwards of 45 billion a day.
- paperwork 15y ago
  You are right, bloomberg is obviously in a different league. I meant there is an opportunity to offer market data to a different set of clients. However, that is not to say that the size of bloomberg's infrastructure is the biggest obstacle to competing with it. Today there are technologies (nosql, HDFS, virtual clustures, etc.) which make it reasonable for ambitious engineers to think about competing with sections of bloomberg's business. Bloomberg does have an immense, non-technical, advantage because traders often love their terminals. From the outside, it looks like an ugly, mainframe age technology with weird commands and ancient looking charts. But boy is it ever useful :) Proficient BB users would make vim users proud.

tzhang 15y ago

Anyone know a service that provides easy access to historical income statements, balance sheet, and cash flow?

danm 15y ago
S&P Capital IQ -- http://www.capitaliq.com http://www.capitaliq.com Depends on your definition of easy I suppose, but they have a superior fundamentals database.
- littlemerman 15y ago
  Looks like Capital IQ is already using Hadoop for their infrastructure. http://strataconf.com/strata2012/public/schedule/detail/22587 http://strataconf.com/strata2012/public/schedule/detail/2258...
apaprocki 15y ago
The Bloomberg API provides access to that information. The only "hard" part is paying for the subscription.

digitalboss 15y ago

Quick replies by Apaprocki is why the internet is so awesome right now.

jrockway 15y ago

My experience with using anything Reuters or Bloomberg is that you do not want their code anywhere near a critical system. It's poorly designed, poorly documented, low on features, hard to integrate, and incredibly expensive. Moving data from one place to another is a solved problem. But not if you are using RMDS. Then it's just a problem.

gaius 15y ago
What's your definition of "critical"? Because people have these plumbed into systems trading billions unattended...
wglb 15y ago
I can't speak for Reuters, but I have worked with two generations of Bloomberg data. One was a trading backfeed over TCP/IP that was pretty complicated to implement. For example, whenever my side crashed or exited, I had to call the NY contact to restart his server end. That was a pretty tricky, but once up it was quite steady. And it was attached to a very critical trading system. The second was a very rich set of all manner of indicative data--a superset of what you would imagine is behind the Terminal itself. This seemed to me to be a very cleanly specified and implemented system. And it was quite feature rich. I am not clear on what relationship this has with their current offering.
- apaprocki 15y ago
  The first one sounds like some kind of custom FIX feed. That would be unrelated. The latter is essentially what was released today. The request/response mode is used for the indicative/historical retrieval and subscriptions are used for the realtime data.

dman 15y ago

Any way of using the api's in 'test' mode? Maybe have the methods return dummy / delayed data ? Or maybe have one instrument of each type available for free so that people can create mockups and test wrappers ?

apaprocki 15y ago
I know internally we have a way to do this (use static files to test subscriptions / static requests). I'll ask if that is available in the package already or if it can be added.
- dman 15y ago
  Thanks Andrew. This is great work!