Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 314 posts

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#141

Post by cmacleod4 »

remarkEon wrote: post #78
SilverRed wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the everyday person actually can get or even handle real time data. I spoke to someone about 4 years ago who was doing it for their startup and they said they had serious problems handling the data volume. Talking about terabytes of data coming in per day. Typical DB systems fall apart under that kind of load.

I'd like to understand a bit more about how Bloomberg Terminals are set up from an infrastructure perspective. Apologies if you don't know anything about that, but the idea that there's just "so much data" that only a Bloomberg Terminal can handle it seems kind of suspect to me. Don't we have other options? Or is this all proprietary?

Bloomberg operates a group of distributed, redundant data centres with massive compute and network infrastructure to ingest real-time data from every exchange and major market participant in the world, across a huge range of financial asset classes. It then fires the tiny subset of this that you happen to be interested in at any given moment down to your Bloomberg terminal.

In addition there is data that only they have because it's generated as a by-product of their trading functionality. If I'm MegaBank Corp and I want to sell e.g. credit default swaps denominated in Norwegian Krone, I can advertise this by feeding my prices for such deals to Bloomberg so potential clients who also have a BB terminal can see them and click a price they like to make a trade. This gives Bloomberg a pool of liquidity/price info that no independent source has access to.

So there are very strong network effects. Even if you could spend the billions to duplicate the infrastructure and rewrite all the software required, to actually do the same thing you would also need to replicate all the business relationships with data sources.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer/cat/financial-advisor/etc, but I used to be a developer at Bloomberg :-)

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#142

Post by unixhero »

berkes wrote: post #138
TheAdamist wrote: post #49

Should probably rewrite it in rust, to solve the markets memory leaks, otherwise everything will keep going up.

I know you are joking. But asides from the securities offered by the typing system and borrow checker, Rust (and Go; and maybe others to some extend) have going for them is that the compiled binary is "OOTB". I'm on ubuntu, and it seems all python tooling is there to start running Gamestonks Terminal. But more often then not, getting a Python, Nodejs or Ruby project running requires a lot of fiddling, insider-informa…

Daft Punk has split up, so it is no longer a valid meme.

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#143

Post by twic »

wyxuan wrote: post #54

The only thing that this shares with the bloomberg terminal is that it can do equities and is on a terminal. Sort of irks me because a bloomberg terminal can do so much more: level 2 data, trading capability, damn near instant news alerts, options, debt instrumentals + so much more - and I get it, this isn't meant for that same crowd and this is pretty well flushed out for a retail investor. But the comparison with t…

Also, this looks like it's purely for equities - no bonds, futures, options, swaps, etc. I suspect that by volume of risk traded by users (not purely through the terminal), equities are a minority of what the Bloomberg terminal supports.

Still, this is a cool hack. I understand that it is not a genuine attempt to unseat Bloomberg!

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#144

Post by JumpCrisscross »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #140
jedberg wrote: post #132

The biggest thing you pay for in the Bloomberg Terminal is the chat function, which lets you talk to other people who also have $25,000 a year to spend on a Bloomberg Terminal. But this is still pretty cool :)

This has that too, it's called "reddit"

> This has that too, it's called "reddit"

If you receive a Bloomberg message from someone, it's something actionable. That's not true, in finance, of virtually any other electronic communication channel.

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#145

Post by chaosbolt »

jedberg wrote: post #132

The biggest thing you pay for in the Bloomberg Terminal is the chat function, which lets you talk to other people who also have $25,000 a year to spend on a Bloomberg Terminal. But this is still pretty cool :)

Just go to 4chan /biz/ for crypto or reddit's wsb for stocks.

The idea that you still need to pay 25k$ for a communication software in 2021 is absurd.

Check my comment history, bought lots of link in 2017 because everyone was buying it on /biz/, posted about it once here and got criticized for it by someone because it's 4chan etc... and people will only listen to you if you have an expensive suite and watch on, even tech people ironically.

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#146

Post by jasfi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #144
blurbleblurble wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has that too, it's called "reddit"

> This has that too, it's called "reddit" If you receive a Bloomberg message from someone, it's something actionable. That's not true, in finance, of virtually any other electronic communication channel.

Can you give some examples? Do you mean it's highly trustworthy?

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#147

Post by atian »

jedberg wrote: post #132

The biggest thing you pay for in the Bloomberg Terminal is the chat function, which lets you talk to other people who also have $25,000 a year to spend on a Bloomberg Terminal. But this is still pretty cool :)

Sometimes I casually flash my B-Unit around or pretend to check the time on it just to let everyone know I have a subscription.

Other times I will go out of my way to send emails from the terminal just so others get a glance at my @bloomberg.net email address. I also have people send me stuff to the email if it's someone I haven't met before.

The Bloomberg Terminal is well worth it for these two perks. It's much better than paying for an @hey.com email address.

Re: Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

#148

Post by tasaki »

jedberg wrote: post #132

The biggest thing you pay for in the Bloomberg Terminal is the chat function, which lets you talk to other people who also have $25,000 a year to spend on a Bloomberg Terminal. But this is still pretty cool :)

Yeah that's why we're using Echofin to chat with my trading group. We have tradingview charts, stock screener and a few self-developed crypto tools alongside the chat workspace. Pretty fucking awesome if u ask me.
Post reply on HN