Can the Bloomberg Terminal be "Toppled"?
mattturck.com
mattturck.com
There are a couple reasons why it's really difficult to disrupt this industry:
1) An mvp won't cut it. If I'm a trader with 300MM in my pocket, then I need access to information. All information.
2)Reliability. Traders need a highly reliable connection. No room for error. A great counter example is Reuters. I worked on a support desk where I had both Reuters and Bloomberg (at a cost of something insane, probably close to 100k/yr). I imagine that when a major pricing error occurred on any exchange, I would find out within 30 seconds to a minute. Despite all its resources, Reuters proved time and again to have pricing issues. Connecting to hundreds of exchanges with thousands of securities is difficult. When you start to go outside of the US, there's some really bizarre logic. Bloomberg was incredibly reliable on the other hand, and their support team responds to issues within minutes.
2) Network effects. Bloomberg messenger is the way to communicate in finance. Also, Bloomberg leverages its network to constantly monitor prices, so pricing problems are discovered REALLY quickly. It's kind of like open-sourcing security pricing monitoring.
3) Reputation. Even if you create a perfect replica of Bloomberg, would I stake my clients money on your track record? Even with a good track record, why would I not trust Bloomberg when it's the de facto standard?
4) IP? not sure about this one, but I imagine there are a lot of features baked into Bloomberg with legal protection.
5) The cost is insignificant for most of wall street.
Funny story: on a whim I interviewed with capital IQ while I was in college. They asked me to design an interface that would allow people to access financial information quickly. Having never used or seen Bloomberg, I immediately started describing a system of keyboard shortcuts, to which my interviewer responded that I was basically just describing Bloomberg terminal. Didn't get the job.
It's not just your clients' money, but your own safety. If you lose money for your client while using an unproven technology, the client might try to sue you for negligence. Using the system that's "industry standard" would be a defense against that.
I would argue that there is a caveat to #1. Agreed that a MVP for a Bloomberg replacement wouldn't work unless you had everything Bloomberg had and more (in which case, it's hardly an MVP and good luck). That said, I think an MVP for a niche fin-tech data product that Bloomberg does not have would work if the sales pitch is that I use your product in addition to Bloomberg. If you offer me an edge by providing data (or analysis) others don't have, an MVP would be fine. Heck, some traders/funds would pay for just a csv file if it contained unique (but directly useful) financial data/analysis (an obvious example that may have had potential 5 years ago was sentiment, although now everyone and their dog is offering that and it's not entirely clear there's direct value to it). I think the very fact Bloomberg can look like its "from the 1980s" just reflects the needs of the market it serves. Wall Street doesn't put great value on pretty interfaces, ease of use, or anything other than direct value add to their revenue generation process (ie. investing, pricing, selling financial products, etc.). Tell me how your product makes me more money today. I think any fin-tech startup needs to be driven by that philosophy if they want to succeed, I don't see how you'd convince a trader that the fact your app offers a nice interface or interesting but questionably actionable analysis is any real advantage if the other guy offers analysis or data that is directly applicable.
Another thought: while disrupting pricing data would be very difficult (given the speed + accuracy required + relationship with exchanges), what about other financial data like fundamentals/accounting/relationships data? That data is free - it's all on the SEC's EDGAR (and it's far more than just financial documents, there's plenty of data on individuals too). Would Fact Set or Capital IQ, for instance, have more competition if the SEC had API/machine readable data? There has been some effort through XBRL to do this - although the percentage of filing actually available in that format and the lack of consistency in the format (in some cases, there's at least several hundred 'tags' for the same or similar financial line item) makes any large scale data processing from EDGAR a massive undertaking.
Presumably the sentiment you are referring to is real time financial sentiment derived from online chatter. A source other than online chatter wouldn't yield enough data in terms of time granularity or symbols, i.e we've had sentiment data for decades in the form of the AAII and NAAIM, they just weren't useful as data sources for active trading.
5 years ago a statistically significant sample set of investors and traders wasn't chatting online to yield actionable data. Today there is, the data has alpha, and smart money is trading on it.
I am interested in your claim that the data has alpha and smart money is trading on it. I have been looking for any peer reviewed, academic articles actually documenting that alpha (ie. by anyone except the people trying to sell you the data). One such paper I found was Bollen et al's http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003. From my understanding, there are several problems with the methodology (I could find a rebuttal paper I read if you're interested) and the methodology was used in Derwent Capital - although the fund only traded it for 1 month: http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/28/twitter-fueled-hedge-fund-...
Care to point me to anything else like that?
infotrie does sentiment analysis on news stories they also mix this news sentiment with social media sentiment. This is a muddled approach and not pure real time sentiment.
Let's back up a moment. You wouldn't expect Gallup to have accurate surveys of the presidential election by processing news articles and blogs. They poll individuals in brief snapshots of time. Polling for sentiment is the same thing. News articles and blog posts are amplified opinions of a small set of people, they are a poor substitute for direct measurement of many many people.
The Bollen paper is widely discredited in our space. Derwent licensed the technology and subsequently ran into trouble because the tech and data was not sound.. though Bollen's initial theory was correct.
Not peer reviewed but you can see a few papers Deltix published documenting alpha:
http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading-strat...
http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading-strat...
News articles and blog posts are amplified opinions of a small set of people, they are a poor substitute for direct measurement of many many people.
You might be correct (sounds very reasonable) but I guess the question is why do I necessarily care about directly measuring many many people? What if loud, amplified opinions are actually better indicator of market momentum?. Tetlock's article suggests that those amplified opinions actually do contain useful information. Again, I have yet to find any conclusive evidence that measuring people's chatter actually ... matters.
Derwent licensed the technology and subsequently ran into trouble because the tech and data was not sound.. though Bollen's initial theory was correct.
Right - I think there are more than a couple complaints about his paper. Why do you say his initial theory was correct though? If I recall correctly, his initial theory was that social chatter contained market information that could be extracted using neural networks and used to predict short term market returns (like a few days forward). I haven't really seen anything along the same lines (especially using his approach of neural networks) anywhere - although the articles you link to might be considered similar.
I am just reading through the articles you posted from Deltix now, sound interesting. One problem is that because of the relatively novelty of services like PsychSignal, the data does not go back as far as traditional indicators (this was a problem with Bollen's paper as well). When you say you have impressive alpha, sharpe, or whatever for 6 months.. that does not really prove much, especially in the eyes of academics. I'd love to replicate or work with this data presented in Deltix - but given the data is proprietary, that's difficult to do.
side note: This was just mentioned in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1807265 claims to find signal in blog posts. That's not to say measuring many people's chatter wouldn't work as well or better though. Also just heard of paper today, so no guarantees about quality but maybe someone finds it interesting.
Izyda, you are absolutely correct on the issues with XBRL. I'm the co-founder of a company called TagniFi that is working on a solution. We have a standardized dataset that makes comparing this data across companies, industries and sectors possible. We are in beta so you are welcome to check out for API for free: http://www.tagnifi.com
The only concern - and maybe you have a solution - I have is that to my knowledge, XBRL has only been required on 10K's and 10Q's since around 2009 (I may be incorrect, 2010?). As someone involved in research with financial data, there's really no avoiding using pre 2009 data. Parsing that from raw text files is even harder than XBRL - is TagniFi able to do that as well? (I've perused your website but haven't found the answer). Unfortunately, without that capability, I'm forced to rely on services like Fact Set at least partially.
Also the performance attribution that FactSet provides requires constituent data from the major indexes. Money managers are particular as hell about their indexes, so you can't just provide generic indexes, unless you first convince them that the generic indexes have value. That could take years.
While Bloomberg has almost any conceivable piece of data in real time, what they were missing was presentation. For instance, if you wanted to make a presentation to your board which demonstrated your value as a money manager, you'd have to leave Bloomberg to do it. That's how we were able to share space with them. But I've heard rumors they are moving in this direction now.
I also agree with the author that the data is really the lynch pin. Some commonly used data can be very expensive to acquire if you are able to get it at all. For instance try finding out what stocks and weights make up the Russell 2000 index (and then legally redistribute that data). We were fortunate in that we got in the business when data vendors were willing to negotiate with small software vendors. And much of the value we offered was in those accumulated contracts.
Once those contracts are in place it is very difficult for either side to cancel them without pissing off their customers. For instance a couple years ago FactSet and Morningstar got into a spat and FactSet's contract to provide Morningstar data wasn't renewed. All hell broke loose on both sides. They made a deal. Data is pretty big chasm for a startup to cross. And users are particular about what data vendors they use, even for nearly equivalent products.
There have been some reasonable exits in the financial software business that don't get much play in the Valley. For instance BlackDiamond sold their reporting package (again presentation) to Advent in San Francisco for about $70million and eVestment has been taking on investment and growing like crazy. But neither of those companies competed head to head with Bloomberg's core business. But they are big enough markets that I could see Bloomberg wanting to grow into them.
In general, if you want a slice of the market that Bloomberg is in, I don't think it would easy to do it head on over data. You have to outflank them where they are weak, and hope to chip away at their mindshare that way.
This actually sounds like a fun little linear algebra problem.
But I do agree with the point that not everyone is a trader. The quality of a lot of macro data often wasn't there. For this I also had a Datastream terminal, which excelled in longer term macro data.
Let's say your firm trades bonds. Your product is your expertise in trading those bonds, and you have to sell that expertise. How are you going to do that? Much of it is still reputation, but the days of closing a pension fund with a few martinis and your good looks are coming to an end. You have to have the numbers to back up your claims.
You dodged a bullet. I worked for CIQ from 2003-2007, it was not such a great time. (I recently reminisced a bit here: http://mcfunley.com/manual-delivery)
At one point I was offered a job with Bloomberg that I didn't wind up taking. In my last interview with a director, he described an experience he had rewriting quite a bit of the Bloomberg terminal as a modern (for the time anyway) Windows app as some kind of skunkworks project. He said he was nearly fired for this. His superiors explained to him very slowly that although the terminal looks like obvious insanity to a tech person, it's embedded in the culture in finance. People like it in part because it's insane. It's hard to attack this with modern methods.
One other giant stinking reason it's really hard to innovate here is data. All of these companies are vertically integrated. CIQ, for example, is (or was back then, anyway) a tiny shim of a crappy tech company in New York and thousands and thousands of people doing data collection in India. The data is the product. Initially CIQ was just the website, and they bought their data from competitors. As they became successful their competitors shut them down and they had to scramble to replicate datasets by themselves.
If you teach devs in their classes you can get a starting salary of around $150k. That's a tough team to get into, since it's one particular team. If you are a developer in general you get around $80-120K starting. I got $95K straight out of a master's program.
Like any other company, a lot of it has to do with their commission to the recruiter that they pay. If you can somehow apply without a recruiter and have them really like you, you can probably get a larger salary.
If you stay for years then over time you'll be making more, probably around $200-300K. Unless you're really instrumental to the company, then you'll be making $500k probably. Still not as much as a trader or quant getting multi million dollar bonuses to stick around. But definitely good. Their company is a meritocracy, and if you want to keep one thing in mind, it is this: the more good work you do and the more indispensable your work is, the more you will be able to ask for in a couple years. Making yourself really indispensable is the trick there, and it's very possible.
Actually my advice to you is this: if this is a whole year away, look around and see what companies you like and form connections with hiring managers WITHIN that company, rather than external recruiters. How? I don't know, get to know employees and then have them put in a good word. They get a commission actually for introducing you, but it's nowhere near what a recruiter would get.
I work for an asset management firm designing the back-end architecture including interfacing data feeds and Reuters gives us issues at least once a week.
They recently updated their Eikon app and the addin was auto-disabled by excel because Excel deemed it as unstable.
I contacted support and they said they were aware of the issue.
Blows my mind that they could release a software update that breaks a critical part of their offering - and not even send an email to clients telling them how to fix an issue that they caused (forced update) and knew about!
Tangential to 5) there are numerous financial services firms of various scales, and even the mid-sized and small shops (for whom $20k/yr + exchange fees is not a write-off amount) disproportionately use Bloomberg. I think squigs25 identifies some of these reasons, I would highlight and add the following:
1) Network effect - Even if you build a better mousetrap capital markets are highly connected. On the sell side we may adapt our technology choices to our most significant clients on the buy-side to provide as seamless a service as possible to clients. Bloomberg messenger has been mentioned by many people and that is a huge factor in our decision making, but simpler things contribute too:
1.a) Consistency - If my client calls we're discussing a trade or security it is a significant advantage in seeing the same thing they see. Be it VWAP on the day to 6dp, the order we're looking at published research, recent trades, if we're looking at the same thing the service I can provide is improved. My service and execution is how I differentiate myself. This relies on us using the same system
1.b) Connectivity - I can have a Bloomberg EMSX client able to send trades to me in ~5 minutes with no exaggeration. Similarly if they want to receive our IOIs or TA (basically advertising from the sell-side to the buy-side) and have an acronym - the connection between the systems already exists and I can find and target your specific acronym in under 5 minutes.
B) Incentives - Smaller shops are, in my experience, less likely to mandate technology to sales/trading/research. It is also unlikely that my personal technology expenses are tied to my comp. Even if cost is significant to the firm it may not be to the individual who have influence
C) Inertia - Capital Markets are not Technology firms. Technology exists to facilitate a job and if it does that well enough there is scant appetite for change. No one wants to re-learn tools that have been familiar for years. They want to even less when that is fundamentally not seen as part of the job, it's a facilitator and should be easy and convenient as a result.
Reliability cannot be emphasized enough. The uptime % we expect (and Bloomberg delivers) is exceptionally high during and around market hours.
(source: work on sell-side trading desks)
Things bloomberg does well....
- Emsx, they have the largest trading network in the world. If you are able to trade, its free and every broker is hooked up to it. You can be up and running in a few days.
- market Data. To get full market data for just the Canadian exchanges is about $15,000/month. With a bloomberg terminal its about $300/month.
- excel plugin. You can pull real time data, reference (non changing data like the dividend rate) and historical market data into excel. You can experiment so quickly with the combination of bloomberg and excel. This can't be stated enough.
- decent api. You can pull the same data you could from excel into your C++/C# or java app with their api. This also really simplifies prototyping and makes it easy to write the basic infrastructure you need at a a hedge fund.
With these three things bloomberg has done something pretty remarkable. They've locked down the lower end market here making it hard for competitors to start from the bottom as the bottom is significantly less profitable now.
EDIT as to what Eikon does better than bloomberg, the answer is not much. They have a bit better discover ability for functions due to their auto complete typing being much better than bloomberg.
Eikon also ranks analysts predictions and then gives predictions as to how a company will do against its earnings, they tell me their predictive model can be very accurate.
Reuters also has reuters news integration which is arguably better than bloomberg's news.
To give another example, in an annual product planning session, the metric was asked of product managers: how many of our user base would go if we removed your product area. The Derivative team got up and said 50,000. The MSG/Comms team got up and said All of them. The Derivative team replied, we were taking a guess on our number, the MSG guys are absolutely right, we lose the entire business without Comms.
24 hours a day someone is available for a live chat. If I remember correctly, hit the 'help' button twice and a chat window pops up where an actual live user answers questions. These questions can range from not understanding how to use some feature to help locating data and beyond. If the discussion is getting too involved for chat, the support person won't hesitate to call you.
Bloomberg bundles in several interfaces beyond their GUI. The excel plugin, which updates your spreadsheet in real time is fantastically easy to use. Programmers can use official apis in various languages to query static data or subscribe to real-time feeds (although exchange contracts need to be signed separately).
Bloomberg symbology is hugely important. People outside the industry might find it absurd that it isn't very easy to know the _name_ of the instruments being traded. Are you trading AAPL? Is it the one traded in US, Europe's various exchanges or anywhere else in the world? Are you using cusip? isin? sedol? reuters symbol? bloomberg symbol?
The bbg GUI looks like it belongs to the mainframe era, but the user interface is actually very convenient for people who rely on it daily. Simple commands bring up the data you need immediately, no need to click though a bunch of menus.
Upstarts will have trouble toppling bloomberg for another reason: vendor contracts are a mess. Getting the right to distribute data is very expensive. The contract costs a fair chuck of change, then the distributor must keep track of every single end-user of the data (which associated costs of technology, legal, etc.) This is the case with very standard data feeds, like New York Stock Exchange! A great deal of data comes from markets where deals are done 'over the counter.'
I don't say all this to discourage anyone from trying. I've thought about this problem a bit and it certainly will be a very interesting project for whoever tries to get in the game.
One year and a half ago I was involved in an important project which required niche data. I was creating so many help requests I got sent a real person for a couple of hours whenever I needed.
For comparison, this same project required even more data from Reuters and the replies from the support team were so bad things escalated quickly to top managers. It took some time but eventually we had a meeting with top managers from Reuters and then I finally got a real person for a couple of hours.
The value is really only in the data and delivering it to you. The server side software might be wizardry as mentioned here but the client software is a joke. Want to render a chart or read a story? It uses internet explorer in as the rendering engine for you and is slower than molasses.
Surely, delighting your customers in the provision of your product/service is what a successful business is all about...
I didn't write this on the previous comment but I had much more joy working with the Bloomberg API than with the several Reuters APIs (like DataScope Select - how can a new API be like that?!).
I doubt BB will be toppled, until a breach is made in their data coverage
EVEN cooler is that they have some machine learning in the background that routes your query to the best department to answer your question.
Wait. You don't need to. Niches actually make it easy to take apart. Concentrate on one niche and do it better, faster, and cheaper than Bloomberg.
Having been in finance, there is a lot of unhappy Bloomberg users. The organization itself, however, is pretty top-notch. They have some really brilliant people working there and the customer service is quite good.
That said, I think in a classic innovator's dilemma scenario, one could build a company that has very few features but does it well and don't actually need to provide support. More importantly, do it for cheap.
Then again, "cheap" isn't usually what finance companies look for. The inefficiencies of that industry is staggering. So long as they come out ahead, it might not be worth it for them to save some money but have to live with limitations.
So maybe the right approach is to target some segment of the finance industry that cares only about a niche and has to really watch their bottom lines.
Let's say you do just that, snag half the market and get 10k users each paying you $500/mo for their niche.
That's still a $60m/yr business.
I'm not the only person to have thought about this - what about new guys who can use 'a Bloomberg' but can't afford the price? Is there a way forward for these guys to create new customers?
Buy side, asset management companies like hedge funds, pension funds, has be the target audience for any startups so that sell side companies would flock into the systems for creating transactions. The term flocking must be taken literally as buy side doesn't have time to wait around to find their favorite counterparts. The easiest(!) way to achieve this is to create JV's with financial institutions which is exactly what Markit did - founded in 2003 - reached $1B and 3000+ employees in 2013
BB can only be toppled by breaking into the buy side community and getting the backing of some of the key players on the sell side. Would they care? Absolutely, as they hate the fact that they have no negotiation power over their data & terminal spend with BB. The cost of maintaining BB terminals is definitely not a noise or a friction of their expenses as some commenters suggested: At every market downturn trading desks are asked to slash terminal costs by deciding between the terminals(BB vs. Reuters) or start sharing terminals. With Reuters banks could negotiate contracts. However with BB they can't negotiate at all as they absolutely own the community.
- While expensive, it's not expensive for the people that use it professionally.
- It's got more features than any single user needs, but each user's got their own subset that they care about that it's a big moat to cross for competitors.
- Network effects. File-format interop with other Office users sells a lot of copies.
- It's "the standard." You don't need a reason to choose Office over its competitors, but you need a reason to choose a competitor over Office.
TR's Eikon product shows you how hard hard it is to compete, depending on the package it can be 1/3 the price of a Bloomberg for a great product, but still has trouble gaining traction...
And of all the trading stuff I worked with, Bloomberg had the less downtime of all. Even it's full (FULL) of legacy shit and crazy interfaces (things like some realtime feed has a binary protocol and I had to write the state machine for doing the handshakes, error checking and stuff). Still, it worked 100% of the time.
Second, for Bloomberg's target customers (big banks, big traders, big hedge funds), the price is just noise in their budget. If you had a "cheaper" Bloomberg clone, you might get more customers but less total revenue. The people who have been trading for 10+ years and know Bloomberg terminal by heart will still want a Bloomberg terminal.
Bloomberg has driven more kernel tunings on traditional unix flavors than any org I'm aware of. Smartest people in the room.
When the activity was disclosed, Goldman and a few other banks were trying to figure out ways to replicate some of the features (including chat). I'm not sure where those projects stand today but my point is that their biggest clients desired to sponsor the unbundling of some of the terminal's core features.
The flipside is, most of the money managed by firms is not handled over Bloomberg nor is Bloomberg the final point of analysis before trades are made. For example one group at my old firm (in fixed income) used a custom built set of tools on top of excel connected directly to their own bare metal sitting on the floors of all the exchanges where they traded contracts. They pulled in their own prices at their own frequency (which was much faster/accurate than available via Bloomberg). Same was true in our group - data came from the exchanges (though with not as custom/frequent a setup), and bloomberg was used as a quick and dirty way to look up historicals/trends, rather than anything live.
More recently I've thought the best attack vector is messaging. There isn't a Bloomberg messaging app on the appstore. Of all the use cases, this is the most irreplaceable - you can probably pay up for all the data flows (banks all pay exchanges directly for higher fidelity data flows than Bloomberg provides) but aggregating that 500k odd userbase of finance professionals? INSANELY HARD. If Bloomberg had an API though . . .
So say you duplicated all that, maybe even with a slicker interface. Who cares? Charge 1/2 the price. So what? Just because the guy down the street sells Pepsi for $1 doesn't mean I feel any pressure to go walk all that way when my $2 Coke is just fine.
I suspect that coming in from some other angle, doing something entirely different, and slowly bringing on-line some of the Bloomberg terminal's attributes and winning over users is the only way. But even that would be tough. If I'm spending all day looking at my Bloomberg terminal, do I really want to fuss around with some other machine and yet another monitor? How can the space on a trader's desk be physically won?
At this point, it's like winning over corporate America's reliance on Microsoft Office products. It's almost not worth the effort. Just build a different app that does something else entirely that helps with productivity that Office doesn't cover...rather than produce yet another word processor, spreadsheet, presentation suite.
There is at most a very small chance you can beat them with the same product at a lower price.
The challenge is Bloomberg is locked in to the hearts and minds of all 320,000 users. Most don't want to change their ways. If you want to sell a trader on a technology, you have to dazzle them in a minute. And these are people who haven't had to change their keystrokes in years. They like the DOS-like interface.
And Bloomberg has billions to toss into R&D every year. Every competitor is nervous about "Is this the year they come for our space, and take us out because the marginal cost of the asset class is 0, since they're already paying for the terminal."
Bloomberg has new recruits go through 3 months of training, where they teach you basic computer science and C and C++, all the concepts underpinning their crazy codebase on the back end. Throughout this whole time, I kept remarking how outdated the Bloomberg front end seemed to be, how reminscent of DOS. One thing I kept mentioning the most is how I wish Bloomberg would take a page from web browsers of the time and introduce Autosuggest as you type.
Anyway long story short, I got lucky. I got placed on exactly the team I wanted - the one responsible for the main Bloomberg front end. Most people were working on a backend function, and I got to work on user facing stuff that all our users dealt with. And lo and behold, exactly the project I kept talking about came down the pike, and I was placed on it.
As a junior programmer it was very rewarding - I wound up building about 3 different modes for reacting to various keyboard/mouse combinations. I kept campaigning for the one that was closest to desktop browsers but they went with another one. I remember them specifically asking me to take away any newfangled transition fx, making it all match the rest of the DOS-like look.
I had a counterpart in another team, working on the backend and sending me the actual data to display. This guy was with the company for a couple years already and probably did way more awesome work than me. My biggest challenge was wrestling with the legacy codebase on the front end. We kept going back and forth under major time pressure - Bloomberg is quite agile - to iron out all the kinks and edge cases. In the end the feature was slowly turned on for internal employees and then our clients.
I gotta say, it felt awesome to have the opportunity to make such a big difference at a company straight out of grad school. To this day I imagine I saved Bloomberg millions of dollars in Help Desk calls (there's a dedicated button on the terminal) where people would just call to ask what they should type.
And yet, after all that, it's just a line on my resume and a story I can tell in interviews. You don't know for sure if I didn't make it up. Don't get me wrong, I am proud to have made a difference and I'm glad to have had such an opportunity. But having my own businsss means I can build on my work year after year, and show that I did it. The value I create can increase over time, and I have the option of hiring others to help me bring it to fruition. Having hundreds of thousands of people use the products that I designed for them, and knowing I can continue innovating on top of this and build more of my dreams year after year definitely makes me even more excited.
Figuratively, probably not, it's basically considered a standard. It'll only go away through attrition as a result of other trading tools providing the same functionality and better, but as this is already the case and the groundswell isn't happening - anyones guess. We probably have to wait for the folks who cut their teeth in the 90's and before to retire, for the culture to shift.
The world of finance is terrible slow at adopting new technology (I know a lot still use XP, sadly). So first, you have to convince people to upgrade. Then the next fun part: actually doing it. 1) fund the change. 2) get the gigantic IT departments to implement the change. Not so easy.
Then, will users even want to use something else? The finance world still uses Blackberry!
When it's someone else's money, you're likely to pick the highest quality and not really care if 80% of the functionality/quality is available for 25% of the cost.
(edit):
- Massive network effects
- User base has the (excellent) UX hard-wired in muscle memory [1]
- Cost is immaterial to the audience
- Absolutely superb, market-standard analytics [2]
[1] One older gent I know asked me why his Outlook wouldn't send mail. He said, "I keep hitting <1><Go> and it doesn't send!"
[2] Many folks don't realize that Bloomberg is way more than just IM and market data. In fact it has a comprehensive set of extraordinarily usable and precise analytic tools that are simply unmatched by anyone else's offerings, including the internal tools of nearly every bank and most hedge funds.
Matt
We are trying to build a poor man's Bloomberg for individual investors and simplify the world of financial analytics.
http://craytheon.info/ (Its in Beta)
That said, your startup looks cool and could be very useful if you're able to extract data all historical financial data from annual and quarterly filings (something that is very difficult right now) but it's worth noting that there any many startups in the space of making investing easier for retail investors (many of whom frankly aren't passionate about or interested in anything to do with investing beyond growing their personal funds) probably the most notable ones are maybe Wealthfront https://www.wealthfront.com/, Robinhood https://www.robinhood.com/, and most related to your startup, Quandl.
There are plenty of retail investors who want to do their own fundamental analysis which is our target market for now. If it works out well then probably we would think of scaling up.
> (something that is very difficult right now)
I agree, our parsers sometimes have a tough time extracting the data so we have to modify the parsers accordingly. Our data acquisition expenses are ridiculously low since we don't have to buy it from third parties.
We already have the service up and running for Indian retail investors with paying customers (craytheon.com). Some of those customers asked us if we can start a similar service for US markets.
Speaking of parsing, I was made aware of http://www.tagnifi.com/ I think elsewhere in this thread (I have no affiliation with them whatsoever). They appear to parse XBRL - probably in much a similar way as you do (although, I think they offer just raw data rather than the screening tools you do, so slightly different purpose/target). Just thought I'd share in case you found in interesting/useful.
As you pointed in your comment that they don't appear to parse pre xbrl data while we do.
In your earlier comment you said most startups in fin-tech space are not passionate/interested about actual investing, I completely agree. I have seen many startups claim that their users by using their service will get above average returns.
So if their service provides above average returns why are they even selling the service, just trade/invest your own money and you will be rich in no time.
The reason we started Craytheon because we wanted a service which would help us make better investment decisions in the stock market. Which is why the first US company we added to our database was Enron.
Check out this link, I think you will like it
http://craytheon.info/articles/enron_fundamental_analysis_ac...
Most individuals should not be active traders, and for non-active traders then your product has to compete against something like the Vanguard lifecycle funds which are damn good and cheap products.
I really want to believe there is a value add in products like Betterment, but is Betterment really significantly better than a Vanguard fund? I doubt it.
It might be possible to charge more than Vanguard, but I think that most who do are preying on the ignorance of investors, and that's not how I would want to make a living.
Can you please list a few, I would really appreciate that.
> your product has to compete against something like the Vanguard lifecycle funds
I think you are confused with what we do. We are not a financial advisory firm. We just take the raw data from convert it into financial charts and valuation models. The end user then can make his/her own investment decision based on that data.
There are plenty of retail investors who want to do that and that is our target market for now.
Insurance. Getting insurance to install a .exe as part of a banks trading process is insanely difficult. The banks aren't interested in going down that route.
What you are likely to do though is bring in new users who were price sensitive or who couldn't justify $20,000 for their particular use-case. For those who wouldn't spend $20,000, $2000 is a lot easier to swallow.
So instead of taking Bloomberg's market, you'd be more likely to create a second tier of service.
Nevertheless, there's no shortage of niche financial software/data products in the $2k per head range, but there's a reason they're not growing big enough to threaten Bloomberg.
It's not just about implementing a niftier interface to look at financial information. You must have the information itself first. Bloomberg has been aggregating so many different sources (hundreds, if not thousands) and they have been doing it for many years now. There aren't that many companies out there that are good at this. Only Reuters comes close to Bloomberg, as far as I know, and they aren't really that close. For individual data sources there are alternatives, but nobody else has such a comprehensive offering. There are all kinds of issues related to each data source that you would have to tackle one by one. Of course, anyone can subscribe to the different data sources, the costs are not going to be prohibitive for a well-funded startup. But regular licences would not allow you to display the data to your customers for free. You'd have to strike deals to be able to resell subscriptions to your customers and make the process easy for them. All of the data providers will want to get paid, data is not free. Once you start processing the data, you have to start archiving it because history is important. Bloomberg has been collecting data for decades. In some cases, they have data that the data providers themselves don't have because they were not so good at archiving in the past and many of them are still focused on providing real-time data only. So, if you wanted to buy historical data, it's going to be hard to get it. Often your only choice is to buy it from Reuters or Bloomberg and they are not going to give you licences for reselling the data. Note that even if you archived a lot of data from real time feeds over time, you still might have problems with the original data providers not letting you use the data for commercial purposes. And last but not least, even you got your hands on all the data that your customers would expect you to have, you still need to process it. Every data source has it's idiosyncracies that you'd have to master (not to mention that data formats have been changing over the years and documentation is often non-existing). This is very tedious and time consuming work, not the kind of stuff that excites most young startup founders. Bloomberg has been very good at processing, normalizing, and storing financial data from a multitude of heterogeneous data sources and they have decades of know-how.
Off the top of my head I can imagine only a couple of possible lines of attack that might have a chance: - Start with a niche solution, then expand slowly year after year, market after market, data source by data source. Your product will have to be relatively cheap though, so that customers would be willing to buy it in addition to Bloomberg. - Buy the data from Bloomberg. Develop your own UI. Get acquired by Bloomberg.
Most people don't realize that clean and correct data is really, really, really expensive to make.