Show HN: OpenBB Terminal – Investment research for everyone | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OpenBB Terminal – Investment research for everyone

github.com

182 pointspunnerud84 comments

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

Why has the title been editorialized to make it so much clickbait? Can you not use the simpler title from the README or About of the project?

EDIT: Does this comment thread look fishy to anyone else? Multiple new accounts created <= 10 days ago coming up and commenting here to answer other commenters, or praise OP/related commenters. Is this some kind of covert, unethical marketing going on? Wouldn't be suprising because they have done it before too. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028675

I think most people who have used a BBT or anything similar know that the main thing you are really paying for is the data subscriptions. While an open source solution would be amazing there is no incentive for anyone to provide you with real time data. Without the vast number of resources that an actual BBT can pull in you just have a charting software with a Twitter feed. At the end of the day the yearly cost of a BBT is surprisingly justifiable if you have the need for real time data for some use case like quick arbitrage trades. However, most people who would want to use this probably want to day trade and chase the market which is an awful idea and will likely lead them to spending more money on data and psychiatrists than they would have ever made on the market.

You pay for most real time data on top of the Bloomberg subscription. Bloomberg would be an unrealistically good deal if it included real time data.

This is not the case at all. They provide their own proprietary non-conflated data for a bunch of different classes (markets, prices, research, news, etc) and it’s packaged with their yearly licence fee of ~30K USD per year.

They have a website you can read about what they offer in their software with the licence.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/product/data/

BBT works with paid data subscriptions of various kinds. There is a location for the various keys for access.

Real-time data is overrated. A big majority of BBT users don't rely on it at all. Not speculation, just actually talking with users ...

FWIW, Databento has just announced a partnership with OpenBB (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/databento_openbb-investment-r...) and they provide real-time data

I wish I had a legitimate-use-case job where I got to use a bloomie

Bloomberg's value is the timely access to data and analysis. What data does the provide? I didn't see it on the page.

Main value is the chat still.

For equities that is true and most Bloomberg functionality can be replicated with Sat Interactive Brokers plus some data subscriptions. Doing fixed income manually without the data pre populated in Bloomberg is very painful. But yes, the chat is where the franchise is and recent SEC actions punishing any non compliant communications like texts or alternative messaging services with massive fines have only given that moat another decade at least of invulnerability.

There are other non-Bloomberg compliant chat applications. Symphony is the big one

https://symphony.com/

but also whatsapp and imessage from company-owned devices. The fines were about chat communications from personal devices.

I think you're missing the point. it's not the chat application. it's the participants that are in the chat in Bloomberg

True

Maybe in theory. The message I get from almost everyone at a regulated institution is Bloomberg, e-mail, or voice. When the SEC is on a warpath, compliance and legal departments don’t play with anything but the clearest black and white lines to optimize for the convenience of staff. It is frustrating because it imposes a monopoly tax on financial market participants to get a Bloomberg or be shut out of information flow which is death in markets. I’ve yet to find anyone I deal with who says hey find me on Symphony.

I work at a financial institution and it's symphony for internal communications. I much prefer it to teams tbh.

What is Sat Interactive Brokers? I've used Interactive Brokers for a long time and never heard of Sat.

That is what I heard terminal was the membership fee to chat and Veblen good of office power.

Who did you hear that from?

Bloomberg provides you normalized data across all asset classes, cross asset portfolio analytics and management tools. First party trading venues, access to the world's largest broker network, immediate access to news including news sentiment indicators across the terminal offering. Access to it's own brokerage (trade book is still a thing I think), buyside and sell side Order Management platforms, APIs to feed the same stuff into your excel and servers.

Did I mention all this tooling is engineered to be compliant across regulatory regimes.

So yes chat is important and having a BB terminal definitely separates the men from the boys but that's additional to the indispensable functionality the platform itself provides.

It was a single person office that acted as a black box between traders. He had aBloomberg terminal to do it all.

How does BBG chat compare to other internet chat? Does it get as raucous?

I had the same question. It looks to me that you have to add API keys for data sources.

Although a lot of work no doubt has gone into this, it seems to me like a bit of a pointless project if someone then must source their own data from various (and varying in quality and price) APIs. As mentioned, the entire value of Bloomberg is the data. Its not an interface which almost anyone can create.

We need to do a better job at educating what data is accessible through platform.

You can find the core here: https://openbb.co/products/terminal#features

In any case, you are right. We rely on API keys because unlike BBT we don't own the data, and therefore, we are essentially a platform that aggregates investment research data - and that the user is allowed to customize their own feeds.

Bloomberg's value is access to POSH. Where else will I buy my second hand Ferrari when the market's down?

in reality, as someone who worked at TR on Eikon and then moved to Bloomberg (law, wasn't competing directly with my former colleagues), Bloomberg's main value that is difficult to displace is IB.

There are people who pay those $24k just for IB.

Oh, here we go again. Yet another project that offers 0.0001% of the functionality of a Bloomberg Terminal(or one of it's genuine competitors) marketing itself with a clear comparison. I wish people would stop doing this, it just makes them look stupid in the eyes of anyone that has actually used one.

What are some of those features?

Most people who use terminals do it to trade fixed income products for one.

Exactly - and the challenge with that is the data is sometimes only available on BBG. So by not using BBG, you’re missing data, and are at a disadvantage.

This is a data problem, not a software problem. The solution isn’t open source, it’s regulation. I’m an American, so I don’t know much about EU markets, but I’m under the impression they have more mandated transparency in fixed income via ESMA https://www.esma.europa.eu/issuer-disclosure/electronic-repo...

Will that happen? I don’t know. We still use CUSIPs over OpenFIGI, paying for all that S&P licensing, despite a great free alternative. Slow moving industry.

You are clearly missing the point of an open source investment research platform.

OpenBB doesn't own any data. But by providing an open source infrastructure, any data can be hooked up into a single platform.

So your argument about BBG isn't valid, because with what we are building there's no reason why OpenBB couldn't integrate with BBG data feeds (if they were open to it).

Regardless, I agree that the Bbg comparison is more for marketing. Our approach is substantially different for a different market.

Near instant news feeds, esoteric data, well formed financial information about companies (balance sheets, cash flow, etc). IM service with other users, live market data, the ability to trade through the platform, the list goes on.

Terminals cost so much becuase the quality of the data and features that they have cost a lot. For starters, there are not many APIs out there that will give you live equity, fixed income, options prices, etc. for free.

Never heard of this and just got finished reading a bunch of the comments on this thread.

My takeaway: Looks like a pretty awesome product. I feel like it’s a little short-sighted to get caught up in one mistake that the people behind this made last year—- deflecting focus on the product itself and the future of the project going forward.

Appreciate this more than you know.

What we did was wrong, everyone knows it. We came out and apologized. We discussed this for days after it happened internally and with our investors/advisors. But there's nothing else we can do.

These people spammed everyone who starred their GitHub repo last year, so be aware. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30900237

I found the project interesting, but those tactics immediately turned me off.

FWIW, I find the founder's apologies in the issue thread [0] believable. Not as in "they were right", but more "they thought this was useful, realized they were completely off base, and it will not happen again".

[0]: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal/issues/1625

I'll be honest, I was angry enough about the email that I unsubscribed and blocked their emails. It’s a one and done situation for me. I personally have zero interest in any project that thinks it’s a good idea to scrape the emails of people that star their repo, subscribe them to a MailChimp mailing list, and send them marketing emails, as if this is Product Hunt (who also wouldn’t allow this without opt-in) and not a code sharing platform.

It’s great they apologized, but for me, it was a one strike, you’re out scenario. And it underscores what I see as a significant misunderstanding of why something should be open source. It shouldn’t be seen as a marketing funnel. And if the only reason something is offered as OSS is as a marketing funnel, gather your data somewhere other than GitHub.

Disclosure: I work at GitHub but had only just joined as an employee when this happened. Had I been there longer than like two days, I would have probably flagged the account and let the abuse team make a decision on it.

Nowadays we are accustomed of this kind of campaigns from everywhere. From the pure marketing perspective it is common.

Absolutely understandable. I simply wanted to highlight their response as it, imo, was not the normal "oopsie" one.

> FWIW, I find the founder's apologies in the issue thread [0] believable.

The comment thread here looks fishy enough that I am disinclined to give the benefit of doubt here.

they probably had a warning of mailchimp that putting someone on a mailing list without their consent is a forbidden use of mailchimp.

source: I worked with an organization which put a lot of people in their mailchimp mailing list

We did.

But that was after I received a SPAM email saying "Welcome to our newsletter" in my personal GitHub account when I wasn't part of that audience.

You can see my interaction with someone from our team here: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal/issues/1625... - When we realize what had just happened.

We immediately deleted that audience (which was our plan all along anyway), but then it was too late, we were trending on HackerNews and Mailchimp pinged us after. After that it was mostly damage control, as there's nothing we could have done to make things better.

It's not spam if it's targeted - that's marketing.

Is this sarcasm? Can't tell...

No it's a ying-yang truth. You'll have arguments pro and con.

Unsolicited email (spam) is spam.

There's really no 2 ways about it. Targetted or not doesn't change that fact.

No one signed up to their newsletter. They scraped the emails of everyone who starred the repo and imported it into MailChimp and subscribed us all to a newsletter. That’s spam.

This is your brain on Finance, unfortunately.

Just like you receive marketing copy in your mailbox.

Merriam-Webster defines spam as: "unsolicited usually commercial messages (such as emails, text messages, or Internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places".

The emails were unsollicited and sent to a large number of recipients. It's fits the dictionary definition of spam, despite not containing a direct advertisement.

Cambridge merely defines spam as: "unwanted email, usually advertisements", which this also fits perfectly, as nobody who stars a Github repo sees that as confirmation of wanting join a mailing list.

Furthermore, if this were marketing (it's an invitation into the community more than anything else) this email may actually violate the CAN-SPAM act. IANAL but I don't think it applies here as the email doesn't even offer anything, it's just begging for feedback.

I think this was meant to be a dry and cynical observation that we probably all actually agree with.

I don't think they approve.

Think of it this way, if they actually approved, would this be how they would say it?

Maybe. Anyone who thought it was a great idea and generally liked marketing would necessarily be so different from me that it only makes sense that I would not be good at thinking like them enough to accurately interpret what they wrote. So I suppose it's possible that this is perfectly direct and sincere, but it just does not seem reasonable.

EDIT: From further comments below, I guess I got my answer. They actually don't see this as a problem. Oh well so much for giving people the benefit of the doubt.

I mean, I guess they're allowed to have that opinion or subscribe to that reasoning that the targeted nature makes it somehow different or more acceptable. If someone wants to say "it's not bad behavior because of X train of reasonong" then all that matters is does X hold water? I didn't add either an up or down vote. But it's not an argument I think holds much water.

I don't get this.

We literally came out and apologize.

https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal/issues/1625 - this provides my initial train of thought. But the "Welcome to our newsletter" was never the email intended to be sent.

In any case, it was a shitty idea regardless. We apologized for it, but there's nothing we can do now to make up for it.

I was more talking about this comment being so downvoted than the original infraction.

Why?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spam

"unsolicited usually commercial messages (such as emails, text messages, or Internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places"

Doesn't matter if it's targeted or not.

Thanks for the heads-up. Guess they don't put that on the front page.

The main thing I use the Bloomberg terminal is economic data. While other services may have more data or better charting, Bloomberg’s offering is updated very quickly, which is useful for trading. You can get both the headline number and then potentially a minute or two later a statistical summary to capture the most important info. I could easily convince my company to pay 20 dollars a month for someone to do this one part of Bloomberg as good as they do it.

The problem with using BBG for this is that I have a shared team Bloomberg and Bloomberg clamped down on using those remotely. If I could use it remotely, then I would just do that.

what other services exist?

also I believe the comments disparaging this post seem to not even have tried it, and uncover themselves as astroturfers from Bloomberg

Can I ask you what kind of economic data do you use? I use ECFC forecasts but for others data, labor market for example, I would go in the site that publish it, so BLS for US, ONS for UK, Eurostat for EU, or FRED that is a good aggregator of US data

Sorry for the delayed reply. I use ECO/ECFC in Bloomberg, along with various charts of economic data. I also use Factset, which has a lot of the same functionality. The difference is that when the report comes out, it is on Bloomberg essentially immediately, but that's not the case for Factset. If I have a call five minutes after the report comes out, I can use Bloomberg to get a quick snapshot of the data. If I go directly to the BLS website, I have to go through 4-5 tables to get the information I need. Bloomberg puts together statistical summaries of the most important info. Bloomberg also has consensus forecasts (so does Factset), which the sites that publish the info don't have.

really what OpenBB is, whether they realize it or not, is a one-stop setup and UX for a lot of the python data tools, which are pretty great and could use an integrated framework.

One UX instead of accessing FRED, Polygon, FMP, AlphaVantage etc. with pandas datareader in a Jupyter notebook is pretty good. The OpenBB name is a bit of pushy marketing. It beats GameStonk Terminal which was (no joke) the original name.

But tbh, might be just a matter of time before they have to change it for legal reasons. But also, there will be some publicity in the forced name change.

Best comment I've read so far. Agree.

I'm going to come to their defence here.

Imagine a BB terminal not for data source's like the FED or yahoo stocks but for the HR department and the operations reports - imagine a company that starts turning its internal APIs into a terminal like this - just taking out the whole powerpoint reporting in large companies will up GDP by a whole two percentage points.

Sounds like a cybersecurity and compliance nightmare.

Some companies have things like this in various forms. I don’t know how thoroughly they’re used however.

Factories and similar have charts/dashboards often prominently displayed with daily metrics and surely someone in “the offices” are tracking that too.

Most tech companies with metrics on their services have “business level” metrics that are readily accessible (eg daily customer use, costs, etc). At Most places I’ve worked the Jira/bug tracker tools have emitted metrics that I’ve seen managers use and track too.

Also I imagine most places that have these metrics… you’ll also find they export an image of the graph into PowerPoint. PowerPoint graphs are embedded in other information on the slides/presentation and live data isn’t needed.

How do use the stock screener to, for example, screen for stocks that are under 200 million in market cap, have 20 million is revenue and gross margins of 20%? I couldn’t make sense of how the subcommand works.

Where does OpenBB get data and how does it compare to what Bloomberg offers?

From 92 different data sources.

It's not our data, it's their data. We just provide it under OpenBB terminal and API, in 1 place. So you don't need to read 10 different data sources documentations and it's all standardized by us

Thanks. That wasn’t clear on the webpage. There’s prominent claims of how many GitHub stars you have but I couldn’t really tell at a glance what the capabilities are here.

Isn’t the next best thing Eikon?

I was curious if this would let me make charts with notes and markers.

I've gone down the path of looking for a way to have a csv with candlestick data and have rows with notes and dates so those dates and notes are marked on the chart in different colours.

This is actually really epic to be able to use, wow. Congrats on making such a product!

EDIT: I initially thought this was open source data but I was wrong, you still need to pay for api’s to feed into this tool, so significantly less useful than I thought. A man can dream

It does have some data scaling for data, but yeah for more in depth and real time you need API keys.

Now if you happen to already have that…

All data sources on the terminal allow you to use them for free. The only thing needed is you signing up on their page to get an API key.

https://docs.openbb.co/terminal/quickstart/api-keys

After that your API key will allow you limited usage, e.g. AlphaVantage allows 5 requests per minute. This means that if you want more access you'll have to subscribe to one of their premium tiers.

Looks great, but I can't find on a glance where the data is sourced from?

At a quick glance, I found these:

Forex: - fxempire.com - alphavantage.co

Crypto: - polygon.io - Script for Binance and Coinbase for putting orders I presume

Fixed income: - ecb.europa.eu

Alternative: - hacker-news.firebaseio.com

Macro: - api.nasdaq.com - econdb.com - fred.stlouisfed.org

There's almost 100 in total

Some of them can be found here: https://docs.openbb.co/terminal/quickstart/api-keys

Cool, Linux binaries would be much appreciated.

What we really need is an alternative to tardis.dev for crypto historical data. Especially options data. They hellish expensive:(

For real-time news and trending stuff: https://biztoc.com

Well done, looks very nice!

astroturfing?

Possibly. But the site loads an order of magnitude faster than the ones it links to, aggregates all the updates in one place, and isn't riddled with Facebook/Google/Twitter crap. If there are trackers, they are not obvious to me. Seems like a pretty decent page?

this is the most amazing piece of software I've seen in a while

Reply on news.ycombinator.com