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!
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.
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.
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.
And quality of data is unknown. If they collect if from some other low price providers, data quality can also be low.
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.
> 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...
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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was an April Fools joke. I've never seen them go down.
That's where we come in -- we provide what you do need, at a price that doesn't break 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?
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!
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.
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?
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.
We're also building this for the retail trader and are focused accordingly :)
Not a marketer though, so what do I know. Good luck!
For each person owning, say, $10,000 of stock, no -- for practicality and privacy reasons.
Please use an email address with one of the major email providers for it to validate :)
It has certainly attracted attention on HN, so it wasn't pointless.
I might be somewhat close to your target demographic and personally have a vague notion of the Bloomberg terminal as a thing you use for high-profile trading, not much more, so I can't do anything with the 90%. I would also think that you're targeting the same people who'd otherwise use one, so not me.
What might catch me (without offending people who know more about the terminal) would be something like "The [equivalent of a] Bloomberg terminal for [your target audience]".
People who know what the Bloomberg Terminal is are going to be disappointed by your product because it's not even remotely in the same realm of capability.
People who don't know what it is (which I'm guessing is actually your target audience) are either not going to understand, or will learn, then be disappointed that what you offer doesn't come close.
If you just ditch that comparison and describe honestly, clearly and precisely what your product does (apparently, provide basic financial data), everyone should be happy.
We're not trying to end Bloomberg, and institutional traders of fixed income, forex, or commodities are not our focus at this time -- we're focused on building what is truly valuable, and improves the investment performance of, retail traders.
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.
(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 ...)
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.
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.
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.
I have no experience in marketing so maybe average customers don't worry about this. But, to me, it seems like a red flag as your spinning something average into something extraordinary.
And as others point out, data provenance and data quality are a pre-requisite to anyone seriously considering anything alongside Bloomberg, let alone as a substitute.
On the plus side, I bet it likely doesn’t have that prehistorical pre-windows, stone-age Bloomberg UI.
> Great data shouldn’t cost $25,000 per year. Now, it doesn’t. Feather offers all the financial data necessary to boost your investment performance, for only $99 per month. That’s 95 percent less than any alternative.
In simple parlance that's false advertising because this isn't remotely "an alternative"
Great example of the 'fake it till you make it' ethos. If you're gonna lie, lie big.
