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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
I think it makes sense because someone can start an operation with few clients and limit infrastructure costs. As the number of clients grows, you can improve your infrastructure. By the time you get to thousands of customers, you can switch to bare-metal servers and dramatically improve your bottom line.
In other words, you don't need a big machine, expensive colocation, upfront bandwidth costs, just to serve two clients.
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.)
In the past I've paid like $4 for the EOD prices and $9 for the implied vol calculations per year...the actual pricing is here:
http://www.ivolatility.com/data/data_download_intro.html
Derivatives data is priced much more reasonably & imho arguably more useful (it isn't tickdata or changing by the minute...and in any case, most option trading models are ok with 10-20 cents leeway. You can't buy a single call, you have to buy a minimum of 100, plus the trading fee, and in most cases its simply not that liquid - you will move the market unless you are trading spx etc
Also check out Activetick (no relationship with them) for a few months. It works on all platforms. They even had an example program that made their API accessible via HTTP. I got away just with that.
I compared their data with another feed and they matched.
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.