
Tiingo – Pay-what-you-want “high-end” financial tools - brbcoding
https://www.tiingo.com/
======
jeremyt
I have very mixed feelings about this.

This seems like a very weird pricing strategy on the one hand and a very weird
charitable strategy on the other.

Frankly, the last thing poor people need is free access to high-end stock
trading tools so they can piss away their money on losers and transaction
fees.

This seems about the same as offering poor people free rides to the gas
station so they can buy a lottery ticket. I mean, you're giving them a free
ride, but to what end?

~~~
iheartmemcache
People are already pissing away their 401k thinking they can strike it rich
and beat the market because they successfully backtested against some tick
data on 50 symbols, paid some offshorer a few hundred dollars to implement
their trading algorithm against IB or in NinjaTrader on a high margin and no
limit orders. Trust me, people have been trying to 'beat the market' competing
against the Renaissances and PIMCOs for ages.

E-trade arguably does just as much damage, letting an average end user (who
often lacks the industry experience of both the financial industry as well as
the company in which they choose to invest) throw their money into anything. A
VC once said he knew the Web 1.0 boom was over when his cabbie told him to
invest in Cisco.

I, for one, think that the Bloomberg reign -of-terror can't end soon enough.
They're as bad as Elsevier in monopolizing information. Information can be
used properly or improperly in any context[1]. You want to see some real
damage? Give that demographic access to Q/KDB+ and let them underwrite a 20x
inter-day margin with their mortgages.

[1]Go to any o-chem forum and you'll see tons of graduate students talking
about research chemical drug synthesis techniques, precursor availability,
ways around DEA watched-chemical lists, etc. It's vaguely masked in their own
lexicon, but it's plain as day.

Edit: By throwing away ones 401k, I meant "cashing out their 401k and
effectively gambling on a handful of stocks". Low-load / no-load 401k's and
(Roth) IRAs are way safer prospective investments often with useful tax
benefits. I keep my 401k with Vanguard and they explicitly say "Very few
Vanguard funds charge fees when you buy and sell shares. The fees are designed
to help those funds cover higher transaction costs and protect long-term
investors by discouraging short-term, speculative trading." which is a
mentality that most people should adopt.
[https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-
funds/fees](https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/fees)

~~~
zhte415
> I, for one, think that the Bloomberg reign -of-terror can't end soon enough.
> They're as bad as Elsevier in monopolizing information.

I don't understand this opinion, and want to.

Bloomberg work with 3rd party data that's licensed not only to them, but
multiple other platforms too. Elsevier monopolise sources so they're the only
publisher.

A lot of data on Bloomberg is public, just organised in a really familiar (to
Bloomberg users) UI.

Getting into detail: A lot of data in markets is simply inaccessible on any
platform (hidden orders, etc), and some data services try to discover this,
but that's not like an academic journal monopolising papers.

~~~
arthurcolle
> A lot of data on Bloomberg is public, just organised in a really familiar
> (to Bloomberg users) UI.

Besides HistData I have never been able to find even high granularity intraday
FX data. Price data is non trivial to find

~~~
jzwinck
Fine-grained trade data is almost always charged. Exchanges charge their
clients to get data directly, and they charge multiples as much to those
clients like Bloomberg who wish to redistribute the same data. This is not
really surprising--exchanges are run for profit and the data are valuable.

Plus, successful traders have an interest in keeping the barrier to entry as
high as possible--if you're making a few million a year not only can you
afford to pay $5k for the data, you might prefer it cost $50k.

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Abundance
I admire the intentions and the hard work behind this however...

The issue I have with pay-what-you-want or low revenue business models is
they're unsustainable.

Either declare something a passion/charity project and make it complete free
(but perhaps open to receiving donations) to properly set users' expectations
or monetize it.

I takes a lot of time to develop and maintain complex technology like trading
tools.

I don't know what the founder's background is. However, if he makes good money
from other sources, after the initial euphoria of sharing his tools with the
world goes away, he'll have stay motivated doing the grunt work to maintain
it. And pay out of pocket for expenses and the value of his own time a PWYC
pricing model likely won't cover.

Making money (and a profit) isn't evil or bad, it's necessary both to see if
your market (and audience) deems your product worth developing and to keep
yourself motivated (and compensated fairly enough) to work on something.

A lot of companies have shut down due to lack of funds (or the ability of
makers to go without making much money). It's risky for an user to try a
product with a tenuous future, come to base their work flow on it only for it
to be closed down down the road. Especially with something like trading.

~~~
rishifromtiingo
Hi there Abundance,

To address this concern outright: in the next couple weeks I was (and still
am) planning to make a minimum payment of a $1/month. Without divulging too
much into why, the company can be wildly profitable at such a price and my
breakeven is very low.

My background has been specializing in structuring data, scalable computing,
and also building trading software and trading models/algos.

I'm in the middle of a raise and so far all the investors, when seeing how I
was able to pull this all off, are onboard with the pricing model and are
eager to get started working together.

I can't divulge too much further publicly quite yet- but not only is this
pricing model feasible, but has gotten the approval of the small group I've
demonstrated it to.

Like I said, expect a $1/month minimum going forward in the next couple weeks.
Also, I've been doing this almost 2 years now, full-time and without a
paycheck, and the euphoria hasn't wore off :)

~~~
Abundance
Thanks for the clarification.

Having investors changes the equation quite a bit. Depending on how much
they've put in, that should give you a good runway to be able to experiment
with the pricing model. Wish you the best of luck!

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voisin
What's the data source for the fundamental data and how reliable is it
(considering it is free)?

~~~
rishifromtiingo
A good friend of mine, Vincent from Sharadar sources the data. It is not free
for me-

I'm a huge data integrity nut, a spillover from when I used to trade
quantitatively. I run my own data cleaning algos and I've found Sharadar's
data to be far cleaner than sources like bloomberg.

A lot of people assume BBG's (bloomberg) data is impeccable, but I had an
entire database of mistakes I found in Bloomberg that I had to correct. Any
quant trader will tell you this. In the middle of the day, Bloomberg would
swap the 2nd and 3rd continuous futures contract. It drove me nuts when it
happened and was a motivation behind Tiingo.

There is this false sense that financial data needs to be expensive. No - to
me the public data is a commodity and that's the way the world of financial
data is moving. Vince shares this idea with me and encourages me to be more
open with my data. I will be offering an API pilot program in the coming week
as I develop my own API for the data I source myself.

Vince's company is: [http://sharadar.com/](http://sharadar.com/)

And is available via the Quandl API
[http://www.quandl.com](http://www.quandl.com)

Also, not only does Tiingo source its own dividend data, but it shows its
work. if you go to [https://www.tiingo.com/d/t](https://www.tiingo.com/d/t)
and hover over the binoculars you will see the values highlighted.

I do this to fight the idea of perceived value when it comes to financial
data. Nobody else will give you this level of detail for dividend data. I
started doing this because I found my existing dividend vendor data riddled
with errors. That's how nutty I am about data.

~~~
zhte415
Share the same passion about data.

I regularly (at least once a week, sometimes multiple times per day) BBM'd the
Bloomberg helpdesk with notifications that their data was wrong. This varied
across many of our needs, but even simple stuff like money supply / macro
stats was often just wrong. How had no one spotted this before? We ended up
just using Datastream terminal for macro data.

Killer feature is Excel plugins. Do you have plans for this?

Edit: Just tried Quandl didn't know about this before. What a fantastic tool.

~~~
rishifromtiingo
It's crazy isn't it? The worst mistake BBG made for me was the futures
contract there, where the WTI 2nd and 3rd contract swapped places when open
interest/volume hadn't shifted! it switched back 30 minutes later??? That was
crazy to me because how many people rely on cl2/cl3 when making decisions??

I do but frankly I can't put a specific timeline on it quite yet. The pilot
API program will start next week and I'll be starting with JSON objects. Once
that moves forward I'll start exploring Excel add-ins.

Quandl.com has an excel add-in already and I may just start plugging in my
data into them after I feel comfortable beta testing under the pilot program.

~~~
osullivj
My addin works with quandl too, but avoids using any VBA or GUI. All the HTTP
GETs are done on a background thread in C#, the result being your quandl
downloads can be far more automated than with quandl's own addin.

[https://github.com/SpreadServe/SSAddin](https://github.com/SpreadServe/SSAddin)

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BrooklynRage
This is super cool. I've played with Bloomberg terminals a few times at
hackathons & job fairs, and this has a very similar feel.

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cschmidt
Isn't tingo.com going to send you a cease and desist at some point? Seems like
you need a new name.

~~~
JDDunn9
Trademarks are industry-specific. I don't see how people would sign up for
this thinking it was for a travel site.

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logn
On pay-what-you-want pricing, can you deduct that from income if you're a
business? Might be better to have business pricing, personal pricing, and
demo/free pricing, and just rely on an honor system for people to select which
bucket applies to them. But if you only expect people to pay a small amount,
then I doubt tax deductions are much of a concern.

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TaylorSwift
For these fields: [http://imgur.com/EPCL65s](http://imgur.com/EPCL65s)

Having a link to those numbers as supporting backup would be convenient, such
as the 10-K.

I think it is nice to have a quick confirmation, as well as reading other
information that the quote provides (footnotes, prospectus, 8-K)

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intenscia
Quite like this idea. Whilst this kind of information maybe dangerous, I like
the fact that anyone can access it

~~~
eggy
I was just lamenting that I could never afford Bloomberg's terminal, and then
I found this, and now I'm signed up. Thanks! I am not looking to trade, but
merely to educate myself, and I am just learning how to manage real time data
or time series. Perfect. @intenscia - what information is 'dangerous'? Just
curious.

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infinite8s
Given the pay what you want, pricing how will you prevent hedge funds and such
from utilizing your data?

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pbreit
"high end" and "pay what you want" don't ordinarily go together.

~~~
rishifromtiingo
Yep, which makes this all the more fun :)

