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Show HN: Feather – 90 percent of Bloomberg terminal, for 5 percent of the price

69 points by akrai ↗ HN
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

107 comments

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mattfrommars
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
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
"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
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.

yuppie_scum
I always wondered what the secret sauce is that Bloomberg has that’s so sticky, aside from force of habit and hesitance to change.
akrai
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
How about the added value of the chatrooms, which is a favourite whenever I talk to people using the terminals?
akrai
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
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
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.

comboy
Chat? And I think it's more than 10% of its value. Chat + price tag more precisely.
dewey
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
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
> 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

kionce
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)
pid-1
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.

merolish
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.
JauntTrooper
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.

merolish
On top of the support staff, they stressed the importance of customer service for all employees. I remember being told that even as a random engineer, if terminal users were to ask me for help I should at least point them in the right direction (e.g. HELP HELP like you said).
akrai
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 :)
ajaimk
What’s the missing 10%?
akrai
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
News and analysis are probably in the 10%
adra
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.
akrai
Do have analyst price targets and consensus estimates for financials, and will have sell side analysis as an option within 12 months.
kionce
Way to go man - do you have relationships with the research departments on the sell side?
siracguy
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
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
> 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.

thestepafter
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
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
Thanks for this very well thought-out response. Will implement much of these thoughts
ac29
> Koyfin has had to shut itself down during market hours because they don't have the money to maintain uptime.

That was an April Fools joke. I've never seen them go down.

iav
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.
jleahy
Capital IQ is also pretty good, although not as good as Bloomberg.
akrai
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
That's a bold claim. Care to share how you aim to achieve that with similar data quality?
ykpramodh
Ex CapIq employee here. CapIQ has a massive 3000+ team in India to clean data when I was there.
jleahy
If you are getting earnings from SEC then you’ll have US only and it’ll arrive a week after they are announced (unless you have a human listen to the earnings call and input them).
akrai
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
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
> 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
Bloombergs data isn't exactly stellar half the time either.
bhawks
Ah but no one ever got fired for using Bloomberg data in their app
hackernews098
Ditto. I use the Bloomberg terminal in a professional setting too. We buy it for the data, this barely has any it looks like.
Youden
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/

helsinki
I was about to say. Stating that the product achieves 90% of the Bloomberg terminal made me immediately lose interest. They lost my trust at the first sentence. Long time terminal user here.
Existenceblinks
I used to work in RT-TREP team at Thomson Reuters. 90% is a bold claim. They had an entire floor in different countries working on particular component.
neximo64
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.
300bps
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
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
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
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.
treyfitty
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.
pixelmonkey
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
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.

Closi
Does it have realtime market data?
mwcampbell
Just curious, what's the tech stack?
rahimnathwani
Getting a 500 error after submitting the sign up form.
akrai
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
I just tried again. Same error. My domain's mail is hosted on Google, which is of the major email providers.
akrai
Check now? Thanks for your cooperation :)
rahimnathwani
706 people ahead of me
akrai
Glad to have you onboard, and please share -- you both get $100 credit, and more shares leads to earlier access!
t_mann
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
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.

sterlinm
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!

akrai
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 :)

kreetx
Right. I and probably many others have only heard of Bloomberg, never actually seen nor used it.
stuckonempty
What’s the time delay on data refreshes compared to the market?
akrai
Same day as when data such as financial statements are posted.

Real-time for stock prices, etc.

haginile
Can you disclose who provides you with real-time data and what license agreement you have in place?
jmcgough
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
IMO Portfolio123 is the best option for nonprofessionals.
yareally
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
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.

italicbold
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.