Oh god, not yet another Bloomberg killer/challenger/$insert_word_of_your_choice
There's an old adage "pick your battles".
People need to wake up and smell the coffee that unless you've got deep pockets, you are never going to challenge Bloomberg (or Refinitiv or CaptialIQ or Factset).
Why ?
Because data. Because LOTS OF DATA.
These companies have global coverage of data. They have global coverage of news. They have decades of historical data. They have live feeds from all global exchanges. They have traceable fundamental data for governments and corporates worldwide. They have presentation transcripts for governements and corporates worldwide. They have analytics tools. They have ... well, you get the gist !
Building and maintaining all those global data feeds costs $$$$$$$ and requires constant maintenance and babysitting to make sure its all functional. The same applies to integrating it all onto one platform to present to the end-user, more time, more money and lots of it.
Bloomberg & Co cost 1-2k a month for a reason. It is simply not possible to deliver it for less than that price point. There is just so much stuff going on behind the scenes before it reaches your workstation.
If you're telling me you can deliver it for 10's or 100's a month, then I can almost certainly guarantee you are cutting corners, lots of corners. So many corners that its pointless.
So, frankly, unless some oligarch has given you a few Billion and told you to get on with it, you're not going to be "challenging" Bloomberg & co, not now, not ever.
About 8 years ago our Bloomberg rep met with us and told us that our use of Bloomberg Data License that we use to load descriptives into our trading platform was going to essentially have a crippling price increase.
They were going to be nice about it though and enact the crippling price increase over four years in equal installments. We were haughtily told there was no negotiation.
About 2.5 years later I emailed my rep and asked, “What is our minimum spend?” and he replied $1,000 per month.
I then switched to another provider. The data was better, perfectly mapped to our trading platform and required almost no work on our part. It was less than 1/4 the price even before Bloomberg’s crippling price increase went fully into effect.
It took my Bloomberg rep three months to notice we were down to paying our giant reduction of $1,000 per month. He sent me begging emails asking to meet, called me daily, asked why I didn’t tell him so he could negotiate. I didn’t reply to a single thing. Then he started calling and emailing my boss. Who didn’t reply.
I agree - competing with Bloomberg Terminals is going to be very hard. But there are so many people (like me) that literally hate Bloomberg the company and will actively ferret them out of any organization we move to because there are alternatives to Bloomberg products that are actually better in some areas.
Right there with you!! We just completed our conversion of Oracle Java to Azul Zulu Java late last year. Taken off 7,000 desktops and I don’t even know how many servers.
I suppose, so we shouldn't try breaking monopolies any more? There are plenty of examples where $big_corp is basically ubiquitous to $their_market until $competitor comes along.
The data Bloomberg uses can probably mostly be licensed outside of Bloomberg. Nothing stopping from these guys getting at least some of that data. Being it is open source, it likely means you can pick and choose your data instead of having _everything_. At which point the price can go down.
> Nothing stopping from these guys getting at least some of that data.
No mate. "some" won't cut it.
What would you say if I presented you with a pen and paper and said I was challenging Microsoft Excel ?
If we took your line of argument then I should be taken seriously because I am providing "some" of the functionality, and so what about the fact that a sheet of paper has no formulas or macros or anything else that a serious Excel user might want.
If somebody is launching a product claiming to be the next "Bloomberg killer/challenger/$insert_word_of_your_choice", then the product need to provide an equal product. Otherwise the product is, by definition, NOT challenging Bloomberg.
I mean, there's a whole ton of so-called "Bloomberg killers" that do little more than provide the same old US-markets data that any man and his dog can get hold of cheaply. And even then, they are only providing a small subset of US-market data, so they are not even competing with Bloomberg on US data.
I'm not going to repeat what I've said already here. If a product does not have data/feature parity on Bloomberg or Refinitiv, then don't waste my time.
Nobody puts everything as well together as they do. And obviously they have a massive library of unique data and functionality.
But there are thousands of competitors of all sizes.
It’s just very hard to see any of those competitors providing a free/open source alternative because the code is not a very large part of the value they provide.
> They are getting the data from third parties while the team is building the platform to use that data.
By definition the bulk of the data needs to come from third parties. But Bloomberg are not getting that data by scraping the web or from free sources. 99.9999% of the data will be from $$$$$ feeds.
Second, ask any data scientist about "third party data". ;-) .... Its not just a case of "plug the API into my server and off we go". Feeds break, data has issues, data needs to be reformatted etc. etc. etc.
Remember we are talking about Bloomberg, a service that provides true global data. Not just the common as muck US stuff that every man and his dog can give you.
and they have exclusive licensing agreements that makes it near impossible to get the full complete data.
bloomberg terminal is not something that can be disrupted by open source, it would be similar to creating a google competitor by scraping alexa 1000 websites. it won't win them over.
I think almost everyone knows that fighting Bloomberg directly is not going to be easy but they can start attacking some niche areas, make it cheaper for others who cannot afford Bloomberg and start from there.
There's an old adage "pick your battles".
People need to wake up and smell the coffee that unless you've got deep pockets, you are never going to challenge Bloomberg (or Refinitiv or CaptialIQ or Factset).
Why ?
Because data. Because LOTS OF DATA.
These companies have global coverage of data. They have global coverage of news. They have decades of historical data. They have live feeds from all global exchanges. They have traceable fundamental data for governments and corporates worldwide. They have presentation transcripts for governements and corporates worldwide. They have analytics tools. They have ... well, you get the gist !
Building and maintaining all those global data feeds costs $$$$$$$ and requires constant maintenance and babysitting to make sure its all functional. The same applies to integrating it all onto one platform to present to the end-user, more time, more money and lots of it.
Bloomberg & Co cost 1-2k a month for a reason. It is simply not possible to deliver it for less than that price point. There is just so much stuff going on behind the scenes before it reaches your workstation.
If you're telling me you can deliver it for 10's or 100's a month, then I can almost certainly guarantee you are cutting corners, lots of corners. So many corners that its pointless.
So, frankly, unless some oligarch has given you a few Billion and told you to get on with it, you're not going to be "challenging" Bloomberg & co, not now, not ever.