Thanks for the mention! The goal is to help liberate financial data and make it accessible to everyone via tools and education. I've already gone where bloomberg doesn't, like a custom metrics creator for the screener, and the podcast is top-rated. Either way, I work my butt off because I want everybody to have access to the same tools I did.
Thank you for mentioning the platform :) let me know if you have any questions!
https://www.tiingo.com
Yes, I 100% agree. I struggle with this decision constantly on my platform (https://www.tiingo.com). People have called it a "Bloomberg Killer" but I strongly disagree. My goal is not to replace bloomberg.
But one thing I constantly iterated was getting that blend. I also found though, some users didn't use some of the features like keyboard shortcuts. Also the way iterative web design works, is it kind of runs counter to developing keyboard shortcuts. You want to develop quickly, but at the same time keyboard shortcuts need to stay the same alongside a fast UX. If you constantly change things when people prioritize predictability and speed, you run into what Excel did in 2007 when everything changed.
It's a tradeoff and I think there has to be some semblance of stability before you can optimize the UX. I think I'm now at that stage but the current paradigms of iterative development make this difficult to pull off in the short-term.
For those of you asking about Packet reliability - been a huge fan of them and supported them where I can. My blog post and company have been on the front page of HN before. Here are my benchmarks: http://blog.tiingo.com/switched-away-aws-packet-net-benchmar...
Since I've been with them, I haven't experienced any downtime except for block storage where I knew getting into it that it was in alpha at that time and I was an early tester. Even that downtime was at 99.9% and they had engineers on the phone with me throughout the night updating me even though it was only down for a couple hours. They don't charge me extra for support which was nice.
I ended up deciding to use their NVME storage for faster performance.
I can't recommend them enough. The backend of Tiingo would not be possible without them and their co-founders and engineering staff helped me quite a bit when I was looking for an AWS replacement. Took a chance with them a year ago (before Series A) and don't regret it.
I went to them initially as I have market feeds coming from NY4/NY5 and AWS network throughput wasn't good enough. Data was delayed and inconsistent. Also Packet had a data center in NJ, 25ish miles from the market data center whereas AWS had it in Northern VA which was hundreds of miles.
Right now I have real-time market streaming and the only downtime I've experienced has been user error. I usually have the #packethost freenode channel up if anybody wants to ask me directly (rishiattiingo)
Heh - yep. They have the type 0 which is $0.05/hr. It was a gateway drug for me <_<. Type 0 is also where I contain my scrapy farm. I find it works pretty effectively.
I'll shoot them a note linking to your comment
Also: Thank you for whomever linked to my blog post!
Yep, I will be doing an API rollout soon. Pilot program to launch in the coming weeks.
In terms of fundamental data or certain data, I will not because I want Vince's business (Sharadar) to flourish as well. Maybe down the line Vince and I can figure out bulk pricing but he has a solid platform so I will not bulk redistribute his data unless we figure out a good compensation plan for him :)
His data is $50/month through for a single user license.
My other data; i.e. metrics (comparative and statistical), mutual fund data, dividend data, fund holding data, etc. I plan to release :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
I'm the founder of Tiingo and just saw a huge influx of users! Thank you HN!
I 100% agree with you. The podcasts are there for educational purposes and I try my best to emphasize the limits of quantitative modeling and backtesting. I was a former quant trader and saw experienced people make the same mistakes.
My goal on the site is therefore give tools, but not recommendations. It's the reason I don't associate with brokerages either, I want the data to be unbiased as possible.
My hope is that newcomers and experienced individuals alike come onboard and listen to the podcasts that emphasize just this.
In terms of pricing strategy, I will be enforcing a minimum $1/month floor coming in the next couple weeks.
But either way, people deserve so much better and I'm going to try my best to make sure the tools and information remain intellectually honest.
Thanks for the mention! The goal is to help liberate financial data and make it accessible to everyone via tools and education. I've already gone where bloomberg doesn't, like a custom metrics creator for the screener, and the podcast is top-rated. Either way, I work my butt off because I want everybody to have access to the same tools I did.
Thank you for mentioning the platform :) let me know if you have any questions! https://www.tiingo.com