OpenBB Wants To Be an Open Source Challenger To Bloomberg Terminal (venturebeat.com) 34
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Anyone who has worked in the financial services sector will at least be aware of Bloomberg Terminal, a research, data and analytics platform used to garner real-time insights on the financial markets. Bloomberg Terminal has emerged as something of an industry standard, used by more than 300,000 people at just about every major financial and investment-related corporation globally -- but it costs north of $20,000 per user each year to license, a fee that is prohibitively high for many organizations. This is something that OpenBB has set out to tackle, by democratizing an industry that has been "dominated by monopolistic and proprietary incumbents" for the past four decades -- and it's doing so with an entirely open source approach.
After launching initially last year as an open source investment research terminal called Gamestonk Terminal, the founding team, Didier Lopes, Artem Veremey, and James Maslek, were approached by OSS Capital to make an investment and build a commercial company on top of the terminal. And so OpenBB is formally launching this week with $8.5 million in funding from OSS Capital, with contributions from notable angel investors including early Google backer Ram Shriram, entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, and Elad Gil. The newly named OpenBB Terminal is very much an alpha-stage product, one that's aimed at the more technically minded. It's pitched as a "Python-based integrated environment for investment research," allowing any trader to access data science and machine learning smarts to unpack raw, unrefined data.
OpenBB hopes that its open source credentials, and foundations in Python, will position it to win over many new users -- flexibility is the name of the game. [...] Indeed, being open source means that the broader community can add their own flavors to the OpenBB mix -- by way of example, one contributor who was interested in the foreign currency exchange market (Forex) added an Oanda integration to the project. Given that the entire source code is available for anyone to modify, companies can create their own version of the terminal with customizations that suit their niche use-cases. If they want to remove all the clutter and work purely with one type of asset, they can create a sort of light-weight version of the terminal with a much narrower focus on Forex, or cryptocurrency, for example. But who is the actual intended end-user, exactly? In truth, it could be anyone from regional investment banks and hedge funds, to venture capitalists, family offices, and mutual funds. Although the product isn't quite at that stage yet -- that is where the initial seed capital enters the fray. It's all about building the product into something that could serve a potentially large market. OpenBB Terminal will be free for now, but "there will be a concerted push to monetize it," adds VentureBeat. "Some ideas currently under consideration include building a 'slick 21st century UI,' as well as developing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, where OpenBB serves up the computational power to run machine learning models on vast amounts of data."
"OpenBB is also exploring ways to build bridges between data sources and investors."
After launching initially last year as an open source investment research terminal called Gamestonk Terminal, the founding team, Didier Lopes, Artem Veremey, and James Maslek, were approached by OSS Capital to make an investment and build a commercial company on top of the terminal. And so OpenBB is formally launching this week with $8.5 million in funding from OSS Capital, with contributions from notable angel investors including early Google backer Ram Shriram, entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, and Elad Gil. The newly named OpenBB Terminal is very much an alpha-stage product, one that's aimed at the more technically minded. It's pitched as a "Python-based integrated environment for investment research," allowing any trader to access data science and machine learning smarts to unpack raw, unrefined data.
OpenBB hopes that its open source credentials, and foundations in Python, will position it to win over many new users -- flexibility is the name of the game. [...] Indeed, being open source means that the broader community can add their own flavors to the OpenBB mix -- by way of example, one contributor who was interested in the foreign currency exchange market (Forex) added an Oanda integration to the project. Given that the entire source code is available for anyone to modify, companies can create their own version of the terminal with customizations that suit their niche use-cases. If they want to remove all the clutter and work purely with one type of asset, they can create a sort of light-weight version of the terminal with a much narrower focus on Forex, or cryptocurrency, for example. But who is the actual intended end-user, exactly? In truth, it could be anyone from regional investment banks and hedge funds, to venture capitalists, family offices, and mutual funds. Although the product isn't quite at that stage yet -- that is where the initial seed capital enters the fray. It's all about building the product into something that could serve a potentially large market. OpenBB Terminal will be free for now, but "there will be a concerted push to monetize it," adds VentureBeat. "Some ideas currently under consideration include building a 'slick 21st century UI,' as well as developing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, where OpenBB serves up the computational power to run machine learning models on vast amounts of data."
"OpenBB is also exploring ways to build bridges between data sources and investors."
It's not like BB was without competition before (Score:5, Informative)
While an open source alternative is always welcome, the major part of monthly costs is caused by licensing fees for the exchanges and other data sources that will not stop asking for money only because their data is being displayed using some open source software.
Re: (Score:3)
Pretty much. Their hearts are in the right place, but sometimes people forget why things cost. The latter part of the summery is an oblique reference to that realization otherwise why "monetize" it.
Re: It's not like BB was without competition befor (Score:2)
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The problem I see is that "the terminal" is inside the exchange, so it has the lowest latency.
Any alternative is going to rely on a third party data source, and if it's not written in C, it will also be at a latency disadvantage.
Re: It's not like BB was without competition befor (Score:2)
The data is the expensive part (Score:4, Informative)
Sort of. (Score:3)
Many of these are not just scrapped through public websites but proprietary data and this costs a lot of money to collect
What this really means is that the logical next step to start reconstructing the data feeds. My understanding is that public data could be collected/processed by a decentralized group of users. The proprietary data is where they really run into trouble and the best bet there is for them to effectively become an financial data vendor that offers the info at a low enough price that everyone uses it.
The real question is if that proprietary data is as valuable as it's purported to be for small time traders.
Re: Sort of. (Score:4, Interesting)
The real question is if that proprietary data is as valuable as it's purported to be for small time traders.
I suspect that the exchanges offer their data feeds as bundled packages. Much like ESPN and all the Disney garbage one must take along with it. And that is all obfuscated behind BB's licensing terms.
I believe that there is some SEC regulation which requires the publication of market data for free, or a reasonable price. Hence the practice back in the old days of providing listings in major newspapers. But to differentiate the free feed from the premium (fee) services, the free feeds were kept dumbed down. I recall many years ago (pre-Internet) that a guy had built a box which could parse the scrolling ticker on the bottom of many business TV channels. And use the output to populate spreadsheets. The NYSE went ape-shit but could not stop him from selling his boxes. In the end, thdy killed off his business by subtly changing the TV feed font. Which his primitive OCR could not handle.
The moral of the story: Be prepared for the incumbents to protect their markets.
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Yea but lots of this data isn't simple to collect and takes time and effort .
Which part of, "public data could be collected/processed by a decentralized group of users," did you not understand?
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Have you seen Wikipedia these days? Its accurate “enough” for general research, but its not somewhere you go for for proper indepth research - you are suggesting something which is the financial equivalent of Wikipedia, which is laughable.
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you are suggesting something which is the financial equivalent of Wikipedia
No, I'm suggesting something which is the financial equivalent of Folding@Home. Work is distributed, computed, and the results returned. The work is computed by multiple parties to ensure correct results.
Why is this difficult to understand?
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If it's not posted publicly then it's proprietary data and NOT WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
Why is this difficult to understand?
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Re: Sort of. (Score:2)
So you're going to collect and process data and present it within seconds or even milliseconds of it going live using what group of users? Some guys in their bedrooms in India scraping websites? Yeah, good luck with that my friend.
Re: Sort of. (Score:1)
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If you're someone making investment decisions for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, data is the last thing you cheap out on.
Oh, absolutely. I was talking about from the perspective of small time traders like those on Reddit who wrote this for their own little group. Anybody doing high level trading would be insane to do any trading without anything but the most expansive and latest info.
Don't get me wrong, I don't see this as a competitor to financial terminals, I see this as a significant upgrade from having nothing.
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Competition is welcome (Score:4, Interesting)
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Worked at a small regional bank... (Score:4, Interesting)
back in the late 80's, early 90's as a 'brown shirt' / 'gray shirt' (maintenance) while working on CS degree...
Once in a while we were called up to move the Bloomberg unit as a part of an office move - a dual display jobbie.
Have to say, at that timeframe, was the most sophisticated bit if kit I had seen at the time, outside of the Sun Spark II setups we had in the CS lab.
Compared to IBM 3274, and PC based systems - it was pretty slick. Moving it was more than a hassle of just picking up the equipment and moving it to a new location and plugging it in... ya' also had to move the dedicated telco connection as well.
So, you weren't just paying for the equipment (which was leased) and per-user license, you also had to pay for the dedicated telephony interconnect at that time as well.
Wrong product name (Score:2)
Data production service, not platform (Score:3)
The "platform" is not the most laborious nor costly part of a financial research terminal such as Bloomberg (or others such as FactSet, Capital IQ, or Refinitiv). It is the data, its scope, quality, assurance and delivery speed, that consume tremendous labor and ongoing delivery costs. The data includes hundreds/thousands of curated fundamental data points covering thousands of corporations globally spanning decades of history. All the history is easily merged through these platforms to be correlated with current, realtime, global market feeds that are no more difficult to consume than it is to drink water from a fire hose. (Be careful not to underestimate the service level expectations of current market data consumers; you do not have the sluggish luxury of taking minutes, or even seconds, to deliver all assured data to all customers [as close as possible to] NOW.)
"Openness" is already a highly valued and well-supported aspect of financial research platforms. Users of those platforms typically integrate third party data sets as well as their own data in order to build unique investment models. So in addition to supporting common user scripting mechanisms such as Excel/VBA, they serve up their data through well-documented API's scaled to satisfy vast needs at high speed to be consumed through whatever technical toolset a customer may choose. (Python? Okay. Are you sure it's not a job for c?)
Good luck competing with those guys. None of them is resting on their laurels, and they already stand atop many years of continuous investment in these highly sophisticated platforms and their ever-expanding data sets. The products are only sustained through 24x7 global research, aggregation and delivery services. Though those companies have been highly profitable, they're also highly competitive and not nearly as nearly as fat in their pricing as the article suggests.
The Facebook of finance (Score:2)
Re: The Facebook of finance (Score:2)
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Except it is... data aside, the biggest lock in is IB (the built in chat system). Everybody, and I really mean everybody on Wall street is on that thing.
Python? (Score:2)
Whay are we talking programming language rather than protocols and formats?
Why would I want an information service tied to a specific language?
It's about the messaging service (Score:2)
Terminal users are able to message other terminal users...considering the origins of the terminal (bond trading and pricing), I've always understood that the real value is in the messaging service. One of Bloomberg's ads touts the fact that they have other 600k "decision makers" on the platform, and their TV and radio hosts frequently mention that terminal users can send in messages directly during programming. No open-source option (or even Reuters Eikon) is ever going to replicate that. One can imagine ho