I made a site to do investment research faster and more efficent, with links to 10k 10Q, charts, industry averages, macro economic data, hedgefund reports and much more
Here's a suggestion for you: introduce a free tier, where a user can perform up to 100 searches per month, and has 50 terminal credits. You let people get a taste of it, without providing credit cards, etc.
I would try it out immediately this way. Otherwise, I'm not giving you my credit card just yet.
The usual problem with free tiers is that you get low qualify leads through it.
Requiring a credit card increases the threshold and you get more qualified user into the funnel. Also makes it a bit harder for people to always sign up with new accounts to get the credits without converting.
this exactly was I was thinking, I really wanna build this into something with which everyone, even everyday people can do advance level analysis, but it just is not possible by keeping it free of cost
> The usual problem with free tiers is that you get low qualify leads through it.
Any B2B2C business could write a book on sourcing 1000s of low quality leads. It seems all the literature out there is geared towards sourcing B2C leads.
Thankyou i'm actually planing on doing that aswell, as of now you can try it out without signing up by clicking on get started button, you get perform search and terminal queries free of cost, but what you're suggesting is an amazing idea aswell, increase the number of credits once people signup thankyou so much for that i will work on implementing that
I would say 5 to 10. Anymore than that and they will pay. If they can't pay they will open multiple accounts which you will struggle to stop anyway. Keeping these people in the system is invaluable.
It does seem to have quite a bit of functionality, though obviously not in the same league as a real Bloomberg terminal. (I used to work on the Bloomberg software for online trading of bonds, repos, derivatives, etc.)
I wish there were a good way to get at all that data for individuals. Always wanted a job where I had a BB so I could just search around curiously in whatever financial asset area piqued me . Unfortunately I did not make the grades for it.
you can certainly get most realtime market data for equities and derivatives exchanges but its not overly cheap or hobbyist tier by any means.
for example dtn iqfeed is around over $100/m w realtime equities and futures, and really high quality data so depending on your focus (esp single segments) the data is very workable. but not many tools let your arbitrarily plugin various data providers
Yes, OpenBB is an amazing initiative but we are very different in the way we focus on user experience and journey tho we have terminal in the name its very much not like a terminal,
its more like a search engine very intuitive, very user-friendly, very fast,
all you have to do is search the stock name, and you'll have access to everything from annual reports to transcripts in less than 10 secs, that is not the case in OpenBB
we have better powerful charts, we have better industry-level data, we have a macro overview section where you can analyze everything on a macroeconomic scale, we also have a biweekly digest helping our user navigate upcoming events if there is any, and important alerts on events like fomc meetings and such, and much more
we do also have a terminal interface, where you can type commands to access everything even faster!!
The OpenBB Terminal is fully python based so that we can have the community working on the platform without needing to rely on other languages or frameworks. Having that said, we are currently working on a better frontend for less tech-savvy users.
From your demo, it seems that it's not all integrated into your platform, so you are just opening a new tab to the corresponding data source. On our platform you get access to a very substantial amount of data, and we make it all integrated so that you can benefit from learning our infrastructure.
You may argue that you get access to the data faster than OpenBB. But you are comparing opening a new window and url to processing data from a source and displaying into the same platform where the rest of the interface lies. A bit unfair.
In addition, we double down on automation. So, the OpenBB Terminal actually allows you to automate your full investment research routine - which I think is something you can't do in any other platform, easily.
Isn’t community the single biggest advantage of Bloomberg Terminal? And no one is focusing on that, but on new fancy charts. That’s probably why Bloomberg doesn’t have real competition.
I would have to argue that while community is a huge part (a lot of trades get done over IB), the biggest advantage is actually data.
Bloomberg has all sorts of connections with hundreds of different economic data providers and news orgs — including some they they own themselves.
It’s crazy how you can get CPI prints at 8:30:00.001 because presumably they have some embargo arrangement with the FOMC.
They have a corporate actions database with hundreds of thousands of mergers, dividends, minority stakes, etc.
They have millions of news articles, hundreds of thousands of securities, symbology for all of it.
And don’t even get me started on the alternative data in Bloomberg: weather data, maritime ship position, satellite maps, polling data, crypto prices, corporate hierarchies, holdings/investor data, millions of bios, etc.
It’s lock on data as well. On the one hand I hear all the 20-30 year olds complaining about BB on a daily basis and on the other hand we have million dollar models (in cost, billion dollar in value) locked-in on BB data sources. Just changing a data source is a major model change with god knows what hoops the regulator puts you through. So I just kindly explain to the youngsters there is a lot we can do for their happiness, but switching from BB is not one. Writing this I think some consultancy could specialize in the BB API. That’s all we need.
BB is an excellent and well-executed business model.
1. Do something that doesn't scale: provide clean, reliable feeds for everything + whatever new thing clients want
2. Package the above in a way that's easier to explain/sell: a device (and now, API)
3. Control the interface
It establishes and grows a moat by 1. It eased sales and prevented competitors from stepping in between them and the customer (and therefore eventually being able to cut Bloomberg out) via 2 & 3.
Consequently, it turns any potential competitor's value calculus into either (a) attempt to reimplement a subset of Bloomberg's offering, thus inviting the "Why not buy an integrated solution?" customer comparison and fighting against integrated pricing economies or (b) reimplement the entire Bloomberg offering from ground up, which is pretty much impossible.
And the entire time a competitor is spending time and effort on (a) or (b), Bloomberg is collecting use patterns and new feature requests from its actual, day-to-day users.
They also have reference data on tens of thousands of bonds, and have correctly implemented bond math and risk analytics for these issues.
As retail typically trade stocks and not bonds, retail traders miss what makes Bloomberg terminals indispensable for institutions. You cannot trade bonds without one.
In a previous life I worked in the vicinity of someone who only occasionally traded corporate bonds.
When that time of the month/quarter came up, they would do some limited research as best they could, but then ultimately the phone would be picked up to someone with a Bloomberg and the words "what does your Bloomberg say about X ?" uttered. They would only make their decision after that.
Bloomberg have built themselves a truly solid moat when it comes to fixed-income data.
yea, its worth mentioning IB has very good execution but very bad data, to the point paying for their "realtime" data (and unusable historical) is nearly an inside joke of spotting suckers.
I think you're giving them a bit too much credit on the international dimension there. For 'obscure' destinations, it can be hard to even get useable government bond yield statistics.
Bloomberg's strength is the breadth of clean data available and the analytics tools that operate on that data. The clean part is important. I've worked on projects using data purchased (quite expensive, think $10,000's) from other sources that we still had to clean up.
Their data is so good that organizations will definitely pay them just for that, just like they pay for other data vendors without social features too. It's a staple for research quants, but they often won't use it on a daily basis, there might even be just one terminal available for a whole team. How important those clients are for Bloomberg I don't know, but it shows that they have a lot more going for them than just network effects.
I can't say there is no spam, but in 10 years of use I don't think I've personally seen any. "Random" people sometimes reach out, but it's usually for ok reasons. Spamming people is a very quick way to ruin your firm's reputation. And depending on what you do, there may be regulations against that type of stuff.
I used to work in a large investment firm with billions in assets. We used Bloomberg API and Bloomberg terminals. It's near impossible to get rid of Bloomberg monopoly in this sector. It's not just data, it's access to data and chat early before something happens to the market. I remember there was a fire in California and before anyone (including major news networks) know who caused the fire they (Bloomberg chat) knew California energy company caused the fire. The companies that pay for Bloomberg terminals are making billions, paying $20k for one Bloomberg terminals is nothing for them.
ok - but please be aware that determination of cause and origin of a major fire is similar to aircraft safety, rail safety or other .. actual liability is not obvious, and not a legal fact until it is written.
second, there have been instances of corruption. The liabilities are very large. Bloomberg data might repeat market rumors?
Legal fact doesn't matter one bit AT ALL to knee jerk reactions in the market. Obviously the people were trying to find out which company presumably caused the fire so they could short their stock. They might only short it for minutes or hours but getting in to that trade early is critical.
This incorrect. The supply(data) and demand(distribution channel) are so entrenched the customers and end users will mostly laugh at you for even offering. You want competitors to laugh, not customers.
WSB has been pretty useless since GameStop happened (imho). It's just memes these days, no real trading talk. I'm sure the actual traders all packed up and moved somewhere, but wherever it is, I sure wasn't invited.
WSB et al are all still valuable places to discover stocks. It's just that you need to be on there 24/7 to get anything useful.
I run an algorithm that does pretty advanced pattern recognition on internet discussion to find stocks as they're about to increase in price. And it works. Well.
You might find this interesting, I run a leaderboard of the highest-ranked US stocks based on their fundamentals and profitability for the last 10 years. Its here https://decodeinvesting.com/leaderboard
Thanks, I do, actually. It's a really neat tool! I'm quite into the stock analysis page. The idea of stocks having innate value is the polar opposite of what I'm doing but I can definitely see a market for what you're offering, and I wish you the best of luck!
Thankyou so much for the support and kind words guys <3 so I'm making it completely free for next 3 days!! signup and no credit required!! everyone gets a pro account
I get that there's enough info on there that it should be done on a desktop, but I tried it on mobile (iphone) just to see it. It started out fine filling the screen, then every few seconds kept slowly expanding the display to the right. Some kind of screen resize check bug perhaps?
You need to work on the copywriting. There are grammar errors. (e.g., “and much more save time and more done”, “access things you in faster than ever before”)
As others said, a free tier makes sense for your product so that users can test it before they buy. But depends on your operating costs. How do you source the data for the terminal?
I've seen 10+ of these advertised this year despite not being in the space -- is there some shift that enabled them, like open pydata connectors 5 years ago and now enough steam that several have grown?
If an institution (like Harvard or Stifel) really pays for your product, then you should write a case study.[0] That would be effective and honest advertising!
However, unless the institution is paying, you shouldn't use its logo. E.g., if a college student signs up for an account, that's not the same as the college itself using or endorsing your product.
A lot of this info seems freely available on the net anyway, it just takes 2 or 3 clicks instead of one. Do you offer bond information and pricing? That's one of the the real benefits of a bloomberg terminal, and it's actually quite difficult to find information on specific corporate bonds on the internet.
The "Reddit endorsements" section actually made me less likely to try your product out. The comments were middling and had no upvotes. Sorry but that's not the way to do social media endorsements. They should be full of praise and have tons of upvotes and awards.
I find the UI quite pleasing and a breath of fresh air. Too many sites these days are mostly dead space. This is real busy, I'd check this every day if I cared about news.
is there a trial so i can compare against an actual bloomberg? might be nice since it doesn't come with the retarded machine lock-in/b-unit BS. also what's the policy on scraping/retaining data for internal use? is there a python API? and where do you source data? quote delay policy?
p.s. for professionalism you might wanna crop the chrome bar and grammarly icon out of the sc on the front page.
edit: just saw the demo policy, thanks man! is there any way i can go look at a company's debt offerings, converts etc?
debt and mergers are coming soon! thankyou for the kind words man, you're awesome
and to be honest this won't match the functionality bloomberg has, as I designed it towards more of a non institutional crowd so the focus would be more on just equities and indexes mainly, i simplified as much as possible with this one
I tried clicking the 'get started' button, but it constantly jumps around as the text 'The terminal for X' was constantly changing and wrapping... Quite challenging!
The data is all publicly available, what we are offering you is the time you'd save, and the analysis for example we offer industry averages, that is we calculated averages of industries and different sectors we you can do by your your but would take so much of your valuable, you can in the same way look up macro economic data, but you can look them up one by one, its painful and you can't really compare them and see the relationship between them to understand what'd going on
Oh god, not another Bloomberg killer / competitor. Yawn.
Look guys, its cool you're building this and all that, but please skip the whole Bloomberg comparison thing because you're only embarrassing yourself.
I've had a fair bit of involvement with Financial IT over the years, and let's just be honest here. Bloomberg has no real competitors. For fixed-income (bonds etc.), Bloomberg is unparalleled. For everything else they have a vast and largely un-paralleled dataset.
The nearest two real competitors to Bloomberg are Refinitiv (a.k.a. Reuters) and FactSet.
Of those two, Refinitiv are the nearest to Bloomberg. But despite having spent many millions of dollars chopping and changing their product, they still don't have feature parity with Bloomberg. Eikon is a great product for sure, and if you're not trading fixed-income products then it will likely serve you well enough.
FactSet lags behind Refinitiv. Its very much an equities focused product. Its not that bad, but still third-place.
And that's it for the top tier. You have a few interesting players in the second tier (e.g. CapitalIQ and Infront). They do the job for people who can't afford top tier but still want quality.
Beyond that, let's be frank, you start wading into the swamp of Bloomberg "killers" who are anything but.
One of the main problems at swamp level is the lack of coverage. Generally you will find US data, maybe some Canadian, but beyond that you can generally forget about data outside North America, and if there is any, it will generally be limited and of low quality.
Good data costs money. There's no escaping that fact. And that's why the top-tier financial vendors charge $$$$.
thankyou so much for writing such a detailed comment
i really don't see this as a bloomberg killer, this is more like terminal for indiviual investors, i really feel like everyone sees things as black and white, on one hand you have your hedgefund investors and on the other you have wallstreetbets who dont care about fundamentals, this is for the middle ground, like a value investor who looks at fundamentals and invest for the long term, even the infamous face of the game stop saga DFV was a hardcore value investor
i really am going after that crowd, they don't need those advanced data youre refering to like they're not gonna trade spreads or swaps, so operating terminals backend would be magnitudes cheaper, which i will pass down to my customers, you made really great points i just view this as completely different product
Ok, fine, but (a) why are you using "Bloomberg" to promote your product (b) have you done some competitive research ? As I said, you are tier 3, and at that tier there are hundreds just like you. Are you really that much different to what every other man and his dog is offering at tier 3 ?
Financial data is a competitive space and so (to be perfectly honest) you should have some clear differentiator otherwise you'll just end up another random tier-3 name.
As I said in a reply to someone else here, to be absolutely clear: I'm not seeking to be a jerk, I'm just injecting a bit of reality. You've chosen a tough space to operate in...
> You don't have to like the work other people post but you can't be a jerk about it.
Ok, since I have to spell it out....
My post was NOT "being a jerk". My post was NOT personally targetting anyone.
My post was telling the reality. Truth hurts, as they say.
Do a search of HN. Do a Google search.
There are SO MANY people out there touting themselves as an alternative to Bloomberg, when they are clearly not. The product under discussion here is just following the same path many before it have trodden.
It is an abuse of the Bloomberg name, plain and simple.
Sell your product in other means, but don't go pretending you are something you are not.
Your post is not in the spirit or letter of Show HN and its guidelines which, again, you can check out in the URL in my comment - they address your specific points.
OT but Bloomberg sucks. You can tell that they’re a monopoly by the fact that they haven’t innovated beyond what was an excellent terminal in the 90/00s. Now they’re just using market position to squeeze people for rent.
I would try it out immediately this way. Otherwise, I'm not giving you my credit card just yet.