

Bloomberg market data API made public for C++, .Net, Java, Perl - Netadmin
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3334375/bloomberg-market-data-api-made-public/

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paperwork
Bloomberg isn't offering this data for free. They can't offer full, real-time
data for free.

I'm surprised how many people on HN are interested in this. If you are looking
for real-time feeds, the best vendor I've found is <http://www.nanex.net/> .
They offer the whole feed, real-time, over the internet. Unfortunately you
have to access it through their windows based dll. I can't understand why they
don't have a native linux client...but they don't.

A very interesting source of data is BATS. I believe you can get free data
feeds from BATS. Since they are a very liquid exchange, in many instances
their prices can be proxies for the full market. Unfortunately, you need
industrial strength bandwidth to access that data (you can't just get it over
the internet).

I believe there is space in the market for another market data vendor. Use
good compression to drastically reduce bandwidth (see nanex), provide diverse
client APIs (NOT nanex), slowly start to aggregate feeds from international
exchanges, provide intelligent routing (100 clients in china should not make
100 connections to a NYC data center, they should connect to a local node),
offer limited access to no cost exchanges, etc.

Unfortunately vendor agreements for exchanges are expensive enough that they
are out of reach for bootstrapped operations.

~~~
apaprocki
Vendor agreements are only part of it. We actually run one of the largest
private networks in the world. There are huge fixed costs with just the
physical logistics of the operation. On the data side, I was curious and
checked.. The aggregate amount of incoming ticks/messages is upwards of 45
billion a day.

~~~
paperwork
You are right, bloomberg is obviously in a different league. I meant there is
an opportunity to offer market data to a different set of clients.

However, that is not to say that the size of bloomberg's infrastructure is the
biggest obstacle to competing with it. Today there are technologies (nosql,
HDFS, virtual clustures, etc.) which make it reasonable for ambitious
engineers to think about competing with sections of bloomberg's business.

Bloomberg does have an immense, non-technical, advantage because traders often
love their terminals. From the outside, it looks like an ugly, mainframe age
technology with weird commands and ancient looking charts. But boy is it ever
useful :) Proficient BB users would make vim users proud.

~~~
apaprocki
I'm honestly curious if 3rd party cloud pricing can allow competition that
makes business sense, though. Maybe someone will attempt it..

As for the terminal, it is constantly evolving. Change takes time :) Mess with
something that works and you might not like the outcome. Just ask Netflix ;)

~~~
Ecio78
_As for the terminal, it is constantly evolving_

That explains why it installs .NET framework, Silverlight, Flash and God knows
what else :)

~~~
apaprocki
It's not a big enterprisey mish-mash if that's what you're thinking :)
Everything has its place. Flash is used for the animated ipanels just because
it is easier for the designers to use. (It also is used for IB video chat
because of its easy hookup to the webcams installed on the box.) Silverlight
is used for all the TV streaming because the live video streaming is built on
top of WM smooth streaming tech. .NET is used as a hosting environment for
bits and pieces such as the Bing maps integration. It is also how apps such as
our dev IDE are run. I can log into any terminal anywhere in the world and run
any of our internal stand-alone apps without admin rights. (And via any
browser using BBA to login.)

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travisglines
I'm not convinced that they're actually offering the data for free here.
Merely the use of the API is now free (You used to have to actually purchase
Bloomberg terminals/hardware to use it). I've emailed both of their contact
addresses requesting more information, will edit this as soon as I get a
response.

~~~
apaprocki
Disclaimer: I work at Bloomberg.

The point of opening up the API is to allow products to be developed around it
without any restrictions on shipping our code within the 3rd party
application. That basically sums it up.

In order to receive data you need to have a data subscription and we pass
through all exchange fees that exchanges charge depending on which particular
pieces of data you would like to access. (We serve 350+ exchanges over this
API)

Previously, the 3rd party app market was a bit restricted because app
developers themselves couldn't necessarily bundle our SDK into their product
due to the restrictive licensing and it was a hassle for the ecosystem of devs
who write apps in this space. This makes it easier for them to build and ship
products.

In order to become a data customer, you can either talk to a terminal with the
SDK, or we sell a managed appliance that only serves the data. The SDK can
talk to either without configuring it differently. All the rules on
distributing the data apply no matter how you get it because the sources of
the data (exchanges) are very, very restrictive about specific use cases of
their data. The contracts spell out exactly who can place the numbers where
and for what purpose. Basically, no matter who you get data from, displaying
it publicly anywhere or distributing it as any part of service requires
special legal contracts.

~~~
Ecio78
Thanks apaprocki for the clarification. Dont you think that an additional step
would be have a public API directly accessible through internet? In the past
customers had to buy dedicated lines for your service, then BLB gave the
opportunity to use internet connections, but with desktop software or
appliance inhouse. The next step will be giving direct access to api from the
internet without other software involved (opening probably in this way more
market for new web applications/services integration)

~~~
apaprocki
Short answer.. I'm working on it :) I want to see it happen, but obviously
can't guarantee it.

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steve8918
I'm guessing that previously Bloomberg either charged or didn't allow 3rd
party access to their APIs so that you could develop your own apps on top of
the datafeed.

By making it open, it opens up the market for 3rd party tool developers to
build apps that can access the Bloomberg feed data.

To those that are complaining, I have a developer subscription to IQFeed,
which charges a fee of around $70/month for delayed data, and I pay $300/yr,
so Bloomberg offering it for free is pretty good. Too bad their data feed
costs ~$1000/month.

~~~
half_marathon
Does the cost depend on the volume of data accessed or is it just a fixed
amount per month?

~~~
steve8918
The cost of what, IQFeed? For IQFeed it's a fixed amount per month. I have no
idea on Bloomberg.

~~~
apaprocki
There is a monthly cost and also tiered, metered usage. Keep in mind this
isn't just for accessing North American exchanges. Our data customers can
access all data we have, from the 110+ countries we collect feeds from.

~~~
half_marathon
Thanks for the response. Can you give a pointer to the Bloomberg pricing info,
to get an idea of the fixed + variable costs?

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shafqat
If anyone wants licensed Bloomberg financial news content, we have that in our
News API and can give to you guys at HN rates. Can be used for commercial use.
We worked hard to get this agreement done with Bloomberg since we know a lot
of finance startup could use this.

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gersh
What is the cheapest way to get the actual data? A number of years back,
opentick had a pretty cheap API for getting market data. However, they have
shutdown. Is there anyone out there with a good api, and relatively cheap data
feed?

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bigbird
Note that ths is just an API - to use it you still need to be a subscriber,
and nothing they offer is cheap. In the tradition of their Excel APIs, this
doesn't even come close to giving automated access to their entire database.

This API seems like a marketing tool designed to get people to build
algorithmic applications around expensive real time feeds from Bloomberg.

~~~
apaprocki
Is there an example of some data you need which isn't served over the API?

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gducharme
Having worked there, I can see that this is a very powerful move towards
solidifying marketshare for then. They were drowning in complexity. Opening
the API will allow them to acquire any small innovating startup at a fraction
of the cost it would have taken them to develop inhouse.

~~~
empirasign
maybe so, but Bloomberg is the dominant player in most of the markets it
operates in. Perhaps with this initiative Bloomberg is looking to embrace new
markets as some of their previous cash cows continue to struggle as debt
markets can't seem to put 2008 behind them. Empirasign is a market data
company whose focus is transaction prices for OTC MBS transactions. We
currently license our market data to Bloomberg for internal use. Our raw data
is a series of email messages, and the output is basically one big table whose
key index is the Blomberg Ticker--which thanks to Open Symbology
(bysm.bloomber.com) is license free. One new market that comes to mind for
Bloomberg is online ad rates. If I were starting a new finance start-up today,
I'd focus on gathering transaction prices for online ads, organize them into
some form that made sense to finance types, and publish this data to Bloomberg
via their API. Now you have two take-out bids: One in the tech space, and the
other in the finance arena. Anyone interested in this, message us:
info@empirasign.com.

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marketmonkey
This is great for small finance startups where previously the costs were
astronomical. I'm certainly going to look at incorporating this in to
livelystocks.com which could benefit from some realtime finance data.

~~~
Maxious
I was initially very excited but once you read the details it's the spec and
implementation of the API for a realtime market data messaging system that is
public and MIT licenced (unlike Bloomberg's competitors) not any actual data
sources.

Presumably even if you want to test a new client implementation, you would
need to have an account with Bloomberg (the magazine article mentions "beta"
markets but I'm guessing that doesn't mean in finance what it means to
developers).

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jrockway
My experience with using anything Reuters or Bloomberg is that you do not want
their code anywhere near a critical system. It's poorly designed, poorly
documented, low on features, hard to integrate, and incredibly expensive.
Moving data from one place to another is a solved problem. But not if you are
using RMDS. Then it's just a problem.

~~~
wglb
I can't speak for Reuters, but I have worked with two generations of Bloomberg
data. One was a trading backfeed over TCP/IP that was pretty complicated to
implement. For example, whenever my side crashed or exited, I had to call the
NY contact to restart his server end. That was a pretty tricky, but once up it
was quite steady. And it was attached to a very critical trading system.

The second was a very rich set of all manner of indicative data--a superset of
what you would imagine is behind the Terminal itself. This seemed to me to be
a very cleanly specified and implemented system. And it was quite feature
rich.

I am not clear on what relationship this has with their current offering.

~~~
apaprocki
The first one sounds like some kind of custom FIX feed. That would be
unrelated. The latter is essentially what was released today. The
request/response mode is used for the indicative/historical retrieval and
subscriptions are used for the realtime data.

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Permit
Wow this looks pretty awesome. As a student who is interested in relating
programming to finance, this definitely looks like it takes care of some
barriers that were previously in place. I'm extremely excited to look into
this.

~~~
joshbaptiste
Then why not just learn with Interactive Brokers API, you get access to their
TWS test system API which is great for learning purposes.

~~~
Permit
Thanks, I'll give that a look as well.

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dman
Any way of using the api's in 'test' mode? Maybe have the methods return dummy
/ delayed data ? Or maybe have one instrument of each type available for free
so that people can create mockups and test wrappers ?

~~~
apaprocki
I know internally we have a way to do this (use static files to test
subscriptions / static requests). I'll ask if that is available in the package
already or if it can be added.

~~~
dman
Thanks Andrew. This is great work!

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digitalboss
Quick replies by Apaprocki is why the internet is so awesome right now.

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salsayarroz
They do not give away content, from their press release: "* Bloomberg is
offering its programming interface (BLPAPI) under a free-use agreement. This
does not apply to any content."

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brador
Direct link: <http://open.bloomberg.com/>

But why make the docs .pdf?!

~~~
alexchamberlain
This is a massive step for Bloomberg; let's give them a chance to improve over
time. One day they might make an appearance on GitHub...

~~~
apaprocki
Already working on it.. I wrote a Node.js module for the API which I am most
likely putting on there soon :)

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tzhang
Anyone know a service that provides easy access to historical income
statements, balance sheet, and cash flow?

~~~
danm
S&P Capital IQ -- <http://www.capitaliq.com> Depends on your definition of
easy I suppose, but they have a superior fundamentals database.

~~~
littlemerman
Looks like Capital IQ is already using Hadoop for their infrastructure.

[http://strataconf.com/strata2012/public/schedule/detail/2258...](http://strataconf.com/strata2012/public/schedule/detail/22587)

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omarchowdhury
This reporter couldn't make the distinction between and open and free?

