[HN Gopher] Show HN: Feather - 90 percent of Bloomberg terminal,...
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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
Author : akrai
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-06-25 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| I always wondered what the secret sauce is that Bloomberg has
| that's so sticky, aside from force of habit and hesitance to
| change.
| kionce wrote:
| Others already mentioned chat etc and I would like to just add,
| Bloomberg is one of the largest electronic trading platform for
| certain financial products/markets (e.g. many types of swaps)
| akrai wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| How about the added value of the chatrooms, which is a
| favourite whenever I talk to people using the terminals?
| glyphy17 wrote:
| akrai wrote:
| Yep, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Honestly, 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.
| pid-1 wrote:
| 1 - The alternatives mostly suck.
|
| 2 - The terminal isn't that expensive for folks that actually
| need it.
|
| 3 - Trading securities in most countries / professional
| institutions involves coordination of many parties. Their chat
| solves that in a very convenient way, globally.
|
| 4 - The terminal does a mind boggling amount of stuff, really.
| Every year someone claims they're launching a BBG killer with
| public SEC data, I can't even.
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| 1) Accuracy - their accuracy is unmatched. Seriously,
| reliability is the #1 reason I value Bloomberg. I've used most
| of their competitors and I almost always have to double/triple
| check primary sources if I'm going to publish the data in a
| high profile report, but I can rely on Bloomberg.
|
| 2) Speed - they are extremely fast to publish market news.
| Their reporters are very good and have a lot of primary sources
| and scoops, especially for companies that may not be otherwise
| newsworthy.
|
| 3) Excel integration - their Excel plugin is huge, it's almost
| like it's own program. Many of our spreadsheets are built
| around them. You can pretty much export every data field in the
| exact format you want if you know what you're doing
|
| 4) Support - they have staff available to answer questions
| 24/7, and their staff is extremely knowledgeable. It's the most
| amazing customer service I've ever experienced. Imagine you're
| a new analyst at an investment bank, fresh out of school, it's
| 1am, you've been told to put together a model and you have no
| idea what you're doing. You type HELP HELP in a Bloomberg
| terminal and they'll not only help you, but they often will
| make the spreadsheet for you.
|
| All that said, their user interface is terrible (though it has
| its fans, and it is extremely fast once you've learned the
| shortcuts) and accessibility is cumbersome, especially if
| you're working remotely or want something fast from your
| desktop. But I'm still a huge fan. I don't even use it for
| trading, I mostly focus on equities and mergers, though they
| would be the first place I'd check if I needed info on fixed
| income or derivatives too.
| comboy wrote:
| Chat? And I think it's more than 10% of its value. Chat + price
| tag more precisely.
| dewey wrote:
| Without knowing too much about it I always thought the "Chat"
| feature provides a pretty strong lock-in.
|
| > When I started in 2002, we only had Bloomberg Messaging,
| which allowed users to simply static message each other within
| the Bloomberg ecosystem. I think it was maybe 2004 that Instant
| Bloomberg was introduced and began to write the book on product
| stickiness.
|
| This old blog post talks about this a bit:
| https://medium.com/the-edge-ai/i-only-date-guys-with-bloombe...
| akrai wrote:
| Yes, messaging is a fair point.
|
| We plan to add interactive communities and messaging to
| Feather. We expect a large number of well-informed investors
| on our platform, so the conversation should be value-add for
| all.
|
| And again, goes without saying but we offer the same high
| quality of data as Bloomberg et al. for 5 percent of the
| price, and our mission really is to enable you to take your
| investment performance to the next level, at a price that
| doesn't break the bank :)
| asciimike wrote:
| > The key point to understand about Bloomberg is that it's
| both a software product and a social network. The software
| product determined who would join the network, but the
| network is what keeps users there. It's like a multiplayer
| video game, or Harvard: Sure, the quests and campus are
| useful, but people keep showing up because of the friends
| they've made or the connections they intend to make.
|
| From https://marker.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-kill-the-
| bloomberg... which has a great overview of this point
| merolish wrote:
| I was a SWE at Bloomberg for a few years. I don't think people
| appreciate the breadth of the platform; they employ something
| like six thousand engineers.
| 300bps wrote:
| 90% 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.
| jonp888 wrote:
| Looking 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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| Seems 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 wrote:
| US only?
| akrai wrote:
| Will have international securities shortly
| treyfitty wrote:
| This 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.
| akrai wrote:
| Also, 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 :)
| Youden wrote:
| You 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]
| dmarchand90 wrote:
| I 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.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| How 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 ...)
| akrai wrote:
| Have 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.
| noam_compsci wrote:
| Do you provide real time stock price data?
| akrai wrote:
| Yes
| italicbold wrote:
| FYI, 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.
| Closi wrote:
| Does it have realtime market data?
| akrai wrote:
| Yes
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Really cool, congrats for the launch
| akrai wrote:
| Thank you!
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Just curious, what's the tech stack?
| Komodai wrote:
| VERY misleading title.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Getting a 500 error after submitting the sign up form.
| akrai wrote:
| Should 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 wrote:
| I just tried again. Same error. My domain's mail is hosted on
| Google, which is of the major email providers.
| akrai wrote:
| Check now? Thanks for your cooperation :)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 706 people ahead of me
| akrai wrote:
| Glad to have you onboard, and please share -- you both
| get $100 credit, and more shares leads to earlier access!
| t_mann wrote:
| A 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!
| rawicki wrote:
| It 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.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| This seems comparable to something like Benzinga Pro but seems to
| have less features.
| sterlinm wrote:
| FWIW, 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!
| kreetx wrote:
| Right. I and probably many others have only heard of Bloomberg,
| never actually seen nor used it.
| akrai wrote:
| Fair point. Entirely correct, our focus is on a different
| demographic.
|
| Really appreciate the constructive feedback -- will keep it in
| mind for our future work :)
| ajaimk wrote:
| What's the missing 10%?
| akrai wrote:
| Stuff 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 wrote:
| News and analysis are probably in the 10%
| akrai wrote:
| Do have analyst price targets and consensus estimates for
| financials, and will have sell side analysis as an option
| within 12 months.
| kionce wrote:
| Way to go man - do you have relationships with the research
| departments on the sell side?
| adra wrote:
| They 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.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| What's the time delay on data refreshes compared to the market?
| akrai wrote:
| Same day as when data such as financial statements are posted.
|
| Real-time for stock prices, etc.
| haginile wrote:
| Can you disclose who provides you with real-time data and
| what license agreement you have in place?
| siracguy wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| 5 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Fair
| thestepafter wrote:
| In 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.
| siracguy wrote:
| Here's a reason to think about trial period rather than very
| limited functionality free-forever.
|
| I don't know who you are targeting, but I would imagine that
| the customer sweet spot for you would be the intersection of:
| - Traders who are engaged enough and delve deeply enough to
| need Bloomberg-type data, beyond what is provided by the
| typical broker pages/Yahoo Finance/SEC/Seeking
| Alpha/fintwit/newsletters/company disclosures (which are all
| very low cost or free and sufficient I would think for casual
| users) - And yet, who are not professionals with access to
| the Bloomberg terminal
|
| I suspect that this is a very small but growing group. The
| characteristics of this group is that they will be careful
| with money (it comes out of their pocket, not their employer)
| but if they find a tool that is actually useful and an aid to
| generating alpha, they have sufficient AUM that it is
| worthwhile to pay a reasonable monthly fee to access it.
|
| FWIW, I'm not sure how much the uptime during market hours
| will be critical other than for day traders. Most of the
| traders in this group will also have day jobs.
|
| This is all very unscientific and not based on data, I'm just
| going off my experiences and those of others I know who are
| in a similar boat.
|
| P.S. Unless you're trying to disrupt the Bloomberg terminal
| itself for professionals, in which case please disregard this
| entire comment.
| akrai wrote:
| Thanks for this very well thought-out response. Will
| implement much of these thoughts
| iav wrote:
| As 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.
| Youden wrote:
| If anybody here is interested in this kind of data as an
| individual non-professional investor, Refinitiv Eikon is resold
| by Metastock under the "XENITH" name [0] for $1800/yr.
|
| It's not cheap but it's certainly more affordable than the
| $10-20k these products usually cost.
|
| The only limitation I really encountered was that there's no
| API access so Jupyter notebooks and the like are out. The Excel
| plug-in works quite well though.
|
| [0]: https://www.metastock.com/products/realtime/xenith/
| akrai wrote:
| Thanks 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.
| qeternity wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Bloomberg has an insane amount of into.
| Corporate fundamentals is a fraction.
|
| You really ought to consider changing your tagline. The
| product looks great, but I expected something very different.
| If you call yourself a Bloomberg killer, you should at least
| have a fair bit of functionality to compete with.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > this is more like 1% of the data for 5% of the cost
|
| And quality of data is unknown. If they collect if from some
| other low price providers, data quality can also be low.
| nly wrote:
| Bloombergs data isn't exactly stellar half the time either.
| bhawks wrote:
| Ah but no one ever got fired for using Bloomberg data in
| their app
| hackernews098 wrote:
| jleahy wrote:
| Capital IQ is also pretty good, although not as good as
| Bloomberg.
| akrai wrote:
| CapitalIQ 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 wrote:
| That's a bold claim. Care to share how you aim to achieve
| that with similar data quality?
| jack_childs wrote:
| how does this differ (aside from cost) from the free and open
| source OpenBB terminal? https://openbb.co/
| neximo64 wrote:
| As 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.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Part 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 wrote:
| IMO Portfolio123 is the best option for nonprofessionals.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Looks 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 wrote:
| Thank 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Respectfully, 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.
| yareally wrote:
| How 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://trendspider.com/
|
| https://www.tradingview.com/
| akrai wrote:
| A 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.
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