Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

If you like stocks and are careful with the way you spend your money, you know how much time goes into buying shares of a stock. It’s tedious and I don’t have 24k for a Bloomberg terminal. Which led me to the idea during xmas break to spend the time creating my own terminal. I introduce you to “Gamestonk Terminal” (probably should’ve sent 1 tweet everyday to Elon Musk for copyrights permission eheh). In summary, the Terminal ( https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal ) has 7 distinct menus: - Discover Stocks Top gainers; Sectors performance; upcoming earnings releases; top high shorted interest stocks; top stocks with low float; top orders on fidelity; and some SPAC websites with news/calendars. - Market Sentiment Scrolling through Reddit main posts, and most tickers mentions; Extracting stocktwit sentiment based on bull/bear flags; Twitter in-depth sentiment prediction using AI; Google mentions over time. - Research Web pages List of good pages to do research on a stock, e.g. macroaxis, zacks, macrotrends, .. - Fundamental Analysis Read financials from a company from Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, Alpha Vantage, and Financial Modeling Prep API. - Technical Analysis The usual technical indicators: sma, rsi, macd, adx, bbands, and more. - Due Diligence Some features are: Latest news of the company; Analyst prices and ratings; Price target from several analysts plot over time vs stock price; Insider activity, and these timestamps marked on the stock price historical data; Latest SEC fillings; Short interest over time; A check for financial warnings based on Sean Seah book. - Prediction Techniques The one I had more fun with. It tries to predict the stock price, from simple models like sma and arima to complex neural network models, like LSTM. The additional capability here is that all of these are easy to configure. Either through command line arguments, or even in form of a configuration file to define your NN.

• throwaway122378 · 2037 days ago

  Anyway to see the UI for people who don’t know anything about code but looking for a investment alternative

• addajones · 2037 days ago

  You are a blessing. I thank you to the moon and back. Will definitely check this out and definitely supporting you for your incredible work.

• druidmaster · 2037 days ago

  You may want to add a Dockerfile.

  • yellowapple · 2037 days ago

    Nothing stopping you from submitting a PR :)

  • nodesocket · 2037 days ago

    Just pushed a really simply start of a Docker PR https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal/pull/13 . Take a look and contribute.

• tambourine_man · 2037 days ago

  Looks awesome. I’d love to see some screen shots as I’m not that literate on the jargon

• croutonwagon · 2037 days ago

  I dont have a github account.... But i was working through sigaloid's post here https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal/issues/2 And was still hitting a error on compile Generally ending with NFO:pystan:COMPILING THE C++ CODE FOR MODEL anon_model_dfdaf2b8ece8a02eb11f050ec701c0ec NOW. error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1 Ran the following to clear the error sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python3-dev Pretty sure libssl-dev and python3-dev were the only ones needed though Also UserWarning: Using slow pure-python SequenceMatcher. Install python-Levenshtein to remove this warning warnings.warn('Using slow pure-python SequenceMatcher. Install python-Levenshtein to remove this warning') So the following was needed as sigaloid stated pip3 install python-Levenshtein

• 29athrowaway · 2037 days ago

  Did you use floating point or fixed point numbers?

  • Guest42 · 2037 days ago

    Great question, I remember inheriting some code that mixed the two and led to some “interesting” results.

  • bidirectional · 2036 days ago

    I can't see any reason to use fixed point numbers here, seems like floating point would be perfectly sufficient.

    • 29athrowaway · 2036 days ago

      Floating point numbers are inadequate to manipulate accounts representing currency, and for finance at a large. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use-doub...

      • bidirectional · 2036 days ago

        No, for finance at large floats are often fine. Plenty of financial calculations cannot be done precisely using fixed point or arbitrary precision numbers either, so there's no point giving up the performance/ease of use that floating point offers. Billions of dollars is transacted based on Excel calculations every day, this whole fixed point for finance thing is a programmer myth. Of course as you say for accounting you don't want to use floating point, but I can't see anything like that in this application.

      • nwallin · 2035 days ago

        You're cargo culting. Floating point numbers are perfectly fine for financial modeling and forecasting. If your goal is to figure out what stocks to buy/sell, it doesn't matter if your software calculates the P/E ratio as 19.232738273816 but the actual value is 19.232738273817. It doesn't even matter if you calculate it as 19.23 but the actual value is 19.22. When you're storing balances or transacting payments between institutions, you need to emulate a specific set of operations, part of which includes using fixed point numbers. It is not sufficient to just use fixed point, you also need the correct number of digits (AFAIK it's 4 digits with US currency) you need the correct rounding mode, etc. Every few years someone comes along with a big new idea to rewrite the aging dinosaur COBOL code that runs the financial world in something modern. It never works. Nobody wants to go through the old COBOL code to figure out exactly what the code does, they take a greenfield approach with a description of what the UI is and an incomplete spec of the operations that need to happen. And then when it comes time to test the system, they get balances and numbers that are wrong. Because the only thing they know is "we need to use fixed point" but never bother to understand the actual full scope of how basic financial arithmetic is unique, and different from "normal" arithmetic.

        • 29athrowaway · 2035 days ago

          The problem gets compounded as you chain more operations together. Financial calculations often involve long sequences of operations and that is where you can see the true effect of what I am mentioning. With numbers that are large enough, a 1% or 0.1% difference means a lot of money. And if you have an automated system making decisions based on those numbers that can translate into financial ruin, legal problems, etc. Leave the ad hominem aside, btw, noone wants to hear about it.

          • dan-robertson · 2035 days ago

            Fixed point numbers have finite precision. As soon as you multiply two fixed point numbers you risk losing precision unless you use more space for your result. You can’t fix your “long chain of calculation” by making it fixed point as you’ll still be rounding things (unless it happens that all your numbers need 54-63 bits of precision and you were wasting bits on the exponent) Apart from in accounting, the two problems with floats are nonassociativity and speed, neither of which are particularly relevant here. The risk of losing money does not look like subtle floating point rounding errors. It looks like someone fucking up a formula in excel or the model being wrong or the model being right but risk not being hedged.plenty of people in finance will add percentages as x + y instead of doing (1-(1+x)*(1+y)) because it’s simpler (this works fine because log(1+x) is approximately x when it’s small, and it can obviously be made better by taking the log earlier but plenty of percentage inputs to a model may be rough guesses anyway (who cares if you write 5% or log(5%)))

        • coolgeek · 2035 days ago

          > Nobody wants to go through the old COBOL code to figure out exactly what the code does, they take a greenfield approach with a description of what the UI is and an incomplete spec of the operations that need to happen. The only way to improve on this description would be to note that the contract rate for each of the persons involved in this endeavor would be in the $485/hour range (of which, the labor provider might get $50). And then to note the 12 layers of management sign-off/approval on top of that - billed separately.

• nodesocket · 2037 days ago

  Where is the market data (price, volume, etc) from? All open source projects related to stocks seem to use Yahoo quotes, which is essentially abandoned and not supported at all. No SLA or any indication of long term survival. I found Alpaca[1] which looks decent in terms of a stock API and their upstream data provider Polygon.io[2] which looks even better but costs $199/mo for essentially per tick market data. [1] https://alpaca.markets/ [2] https://polygon.io

  • sevencolors · 2037 days ago

    According to the docs it uses https://www.alphavantage.co/

    • cambalache · 2037 days ago

      He just wanted to push his service. HN comment section has been unbearable recently with the substantial increase of people doing this. It has always been present but now it is almost reaching the point of making the comment section worthless.

      • johnwyles · 2037 days ago

        I'm OK with it so long as it's something on GitHub, useful, and you can drop in replace it.

        • cambalache · 2037 days ago

          I am OK if it is something directly relevant to the topic and it is presented in a direct manner, but no, 99% of the time it is some disingenuous thing like this: "Hey guys you are talking about nuclear engineering, that made me wonder how fishes in my zone would be affected by a nearby nuclear plant . I use allmyfishes.com which seems to be a great site detailing all the fishes in the US, there is a free tier and good paid plans. _disclaimer_ I founded allmyfishes.com"

          • roddds · 2037 days ago

            And it just happened again, in this same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260064

            • exdsq · 2037 days ago

              I think we need some sort of AI tool to identify these cases. I read a review on findbssales.io which says it could do exactly this, with a good payment model based on API calls. Disclaimer, I built findbssales.io

              • ecnerwala · 2037 days ago

                findbssales.io is down.

            • spxdcz · 2036 days ago

              I won’t mention that website, but FYI I built it and I have no idea who posted that comment.

          • csomar · 2037 days ago

            I don't think nodesocket is affiliated with the sites he linked, nor I find any links between the two?

      • TaylorAlexander · 2037 days ago

        For real, this has been a big problem for a lot of people. So I built a real time comment pruning algorithm service that lets you browse HN with only quality comments. Subscribe today!

      • lallysingh · 2036 days ago

        Pushing your own product has been standard and encouraged practice at HN since the beginning. This is an incubator site!

        • scaladev · 2036 days ago

          Even if you are posting a fake review as a third person?

      • Hnrobert42 · 2036 days ago

        Who just wanted to push this service? OP or sevencolors? Either way, as a counterweight to all the conspiracy theory nonsense on the web, I have been making an effort to not assume I know people’s hidden intentions. I’d like to invite you to join me in that.

        • cambalache · 2036 days ago

          Nigerian princes must really love you.

        • ImprovedSilence · 2036 days ago

          Yeah im just as lost as you. Im not really sure who is pushing what service that is their own... either way, I did find all the links relevant, and worthwhile knowing about..... shrug

      • wrycoder · 2036 days ago

        There are quite a lot of comments that make it to the top which say, "That's nice, I made this similar thing which is really interesting, here's a <link>." Followed by a big thread about their thing. I don't mind those comments so much, as they can lead to good stuff, but I do mind them derailing the main thread when they are upvoted. So, I often downvote them in retaliation.

      • g8oz · 2036 days ago

        What is this low-quality cynicism? Why do you think that it's his service?

  • oogali · 2036 days ago

    Alpaca is primarily for trading. They were using Polygon for data, but if I recall correctly, I believe seeing an email or such that they're going to roll out their own data and discontinue the Polygon "bridge".

• valuearb · 2037 days ago

  if it doesn't come with an ISDA, I'm not interested. "JP Morgan Employee : But, uh... you guys are under the capital requirements for an ISDA. Charlie Geller : By how much? JP Morgan Employee : [thinking] Uh... how much? One billion, four hundred seventy million. So... a lot. Charlie Geller : This makes us look bad, doesn't it? That we didn't know what the capital requirements were? JP Morgan Employee : Uh... it's not great. But keep up those returns and give us a call way down the line, you know. Okay?"

  • ananthrk · 2037 days ago

    Can you provide some more context on this?

    • sezna · 2037 days ago

      Quote from the movie Margin Call.

      • thisarticle · 2037 days ago

        Also a good movie, but wrong. The Big Short is correct.

      • omarhaneef · 2036 days ago

        You're thinking of: "Please, speak as you might to a young child or a Golden Retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you that."

        • ThisIsTheWay · 2036 days ago

          Jeremy Irons is a god in Margin Call, such a good performance.

    • n0on3 · 2037 days ago

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/

    • Flockster · 2037 days ago

      It's a quote from "The Big Short".

      • barrenko · 2037 days ago

        I could watch The Big Short and Moneyball all day every day.

        • jamesbfb · 2036 days ago

          I swear we must be the same person!

      • chrisfinazzo · 2036 days ago

        Don't forget the best line in the movie, usable anytime there is a bit of malfeasance afoot: "Holy shit, that’s just fucking crazy. That’s fraud!" I find myself quoting this a hell of a lot in the last few years.

    • slissenburg · 2037 days ago

      Watch the movie "the big short". It's really good. This is from one of the scenes where too guys try to get a license. Although the manage a few million dollars, in order to get the license they should have even more. Or as it turns out the right connections.

      • mortdeus · 2037 days ago

        the book is even better.

        • slissenburg · 2037 days ago

          Yep, plus that. Although I had to buy the Dutch (My native language) version too (first bought the English version). The subjects are pretty difficult so reading about them in my native language worked better for me.

        • wrycoder · 2036 days ago

          Both are good. The flick is quite faithful to the book, especially in tone.

        • willturman · 2036 days ago

          Michael Lewis, author of the Big Short, also wrote Liar's Poker about his experience at Solomon Brothers in the mid-eighties where things like mortgage backed securities were invented. It's captivating.

    • yakshaving_jgt · 2036 days ago

      It's the best scene in the movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo1OSqBQYmk

      • bidirectional · 2036 days ago

        Reading the comments, I'm struck by how I read this scene totally differently to most of them. I see an overworked, annoyed young analyst sent to deal with two rich kids (starting a hedge fund with money they made 'taking boats down the river', then skipping the ISDA requirements by calling their neighbour) who are wasting everyone's time by not even doing the absolute minimum research -- it was 2006, just Google ISDA and you find out the requirements. Also a security guard kicking out two men in suits from a lobby is just weirdly unrealistic.

        • omarhaneef · 2036 days ago

          To test this out, I googled ISDA capital requirements and sure enough it doesn't mention the capital requirements in any of the links I found (ymmv). I think the issue is that they're bespoke transactions so the credit support required may change depending on the context.

      • ThisIsTheWay · 2036 days ago

        Its a great scene, but this one takes the cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE "That's a nice shirt, do they make it for men?" "Somehow you're like Dora the Explorer and you're the first person who has found this thing..."

        • jdmoreira · 2036 days ago

          It's a great scene, but this one takes the cake: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ5VfKSYvSk "There’s some shady stuff going down. God, this is intimate. I feel like I’m financially inside of you or something." "I'm jacked. Jacked to tits!"

          • ThisIsTheWay · 2036 days ago

            Literally laughed out loud, thanks for the smile on a tough afternoon.

  • fareesh · 2036 days ago

    Ah the wily Brownhole fund from the 2008 collapse

• josephjrobison · 2037 days ago

  Wrap it in a SaaS and dummies like me will buy it! Make a mill!

  • orky56 · 2037 days ago

    This right here except a mil is an understatement

    • josephjrobison · 2036 days ago

      Make a trill!

  • spyridonas · 2036 days ago

    He should accept GME stock as payment medium. 10 stocks per year

    • jk7tarYZAQNpTQa · 2036 days ago

      I'll give you my GME when you pry it from my dead, cold hands.

• nashequilibrium · 2037 days ago

  Does it have the chat feature as well?

• ghego1 · 2037 days ago

  Impressive work, I didn't know could code!

• RivieraKid · 2036 days ago

  > probably should’ve sent 1 tweet everyday to Elon Musk for copyrights permission eheh Why? I assume you're doing this as an advertisment?

• imtringued · 2036 days ago

  Have you considered the problem that any publicly available indicator suffers from the fact that being the first to execute the strategy is the only way to make money? This would imply an entirely algorithmic trading strategy to reduce any potential for delay. That's how we end up with HFT. Maybe not subsecond HFT but <10s HFT.

I am giddy with excitement over this project! Thank you sexy_year for making this. Got any screen shots posted?

• peterwoerner · 2037 days ago

  I am making a comment just so I will see the project later. Swamped at work but in a week when I have some free time... I feel like a kid waiting on Christmas with presents under the tree.

  • gzer0 · 2037 days ago

    likewise, profiled.

  • vulcan01 · 2037 days ago

    There is a "favorites" button right under the submission title, which you can then access through "favorite submissions" in your profile.

    • peterwoerner · 2037 days ago

      Awesome, thanks for the tip.

    • cambalache · 2037 days ago

      A button I love, but for some irritating reason (I suppose because the lack of JS) takes you to the main favorites page every time you mark a post as favorite

Wow. This looks awesome. When you say "necessary API keys", does this mean you can still use the program without them, just minus those functions? e: and is there a way to perform all DD, PT, etc? e2: oh no! 'xlwings requires an installation of Excel and therefore only works on Windows and macOS. To enable the installation on Linux nevertheless, do: export INSTALL_ON_LINUX=1; pip install xlwings' e3: https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal/issues/2

I wish I was more literate in these subjects, some of these terms - I am not familiar with such as `sma, rsi, macd, adx, bbands`

• galoisscobi · 2037 days ago

  I'd recommend Investopedia to learn more about those terms. As someone with a robotics background, I used Investopedia extensively when I was taking Machine Learning for Trading (would highly recommend the course as well: https://www.udacity.com/course/machine-learning-for-trading-... ) if that's something you're interested in.

  • riffraff · 2037 days ago

    One more nice thing about Investopedia: they have recently restructured their newsletter ("one term a day") to include references to current events. That is really nice because it not only gives you something to learn but it also puts it in context.

    • baby · 2037 days ago

      I was curious so I found it: https://link.investopedia.com/join/53o/00-house-tod

  • TILMore · 2037 days ago

    For someone new to ML for Trading, would you have any other courses or links to check out?

• oliv__ · 2037 days ago

  They are technical indicators: Simple moving average, Relative strength index, Moving Average Convergence-Divergence, Average Directional Index, Bollinger Bands. You can google each one, there is usually a decent explanatory article

• tastyfreeze · 2037 days ago

  The are all acronyms for functions on time series trade data. Investopedia has definitions without a lot of fluff if you want to learn them.

• totalZero · 2037 days ago

  They are terms relating to technical analysis, an attempt to determine future price action from past price action. Many traders look down on technicals as an attempt to read tea leaves while ignoring more important information. Myself included. Still, technical analysis can on occasion be a useful tool when making tactical decisions because people do watch certain levels, reversion and breakouts are real phenomena, and any widespread trading approach is at times a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  • edgyquant · 2037 days ago

    I think you’re right about rsi, macd, etc but sma, ema, alpha, beta and sharpe are essential to look at before buying any stock imo

need better install instructions.

Looks interesting, I've been wanting to build something like this - thanks for potentially saving me a bunch of time!

this is nice - it looks like it's linked against at least one GPL lib (fuzzywuzzy) though, so the MIT license almost certainly isn't allowed. looks like there's only one usage though, the other is an unused import, so may be easy to change

• moonchild · 2037 days ago

  The MIT license is ‘allowed’. The code in itself is MIT licensed. It's just that, when compiled and linked against fuzzywuzzy, the aggregate work that results must be GPLed.

  • maximente · 2037 days ago

    interesting: given that it may at any time hit that line of GPL'd code, your claim is that the rest of the code can be MIT licensed? i am not a lawyer but that sure seems like a borderline case at best.

    • GoOnThenDoTell · 2037 days ago

      The author can licence their source code however they want. The GPL doesn’t relicense other code either, it’s that the GPL asks you to additionally follow its terms for the whole resulting compiled distribution

      • regularfry · 2037 days ago

        This is incorrect, and it's precisely for this sort of situation that the LGPL exists. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL The problem for the author in this case is that a) writing their code against a GPL'd library constitutes creating a derivative work, and b) putting it on GitHub is distribution.

        • moonchild · 2037 days ago

          The page you linked contradicts you: > the terms of the GPL apply to the entire combination . The software modules that link with the library may be under various GPL compatible licenses , but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL. The application is a ‘software module’ licensed under the MIT license (a ‘GPL compatible license’). When you link that application against the GPL'd library, the resultant ‘work as a whole’ must be provided under the terms of the GPL. (Since the MIT license allows relicensing, and the GPL does not contradict any of the terms of the MIT license, this is legal. If the MIT license did not allow relicensing, or if it contradicted some term of the GPL, the OP's application would still be legally licensed under the MIT license. It would just be illegal to link it against its GPL'd dependency.)

          • 40four · 2036 days ago

            The key part is “ but the work as whole must be licensed under the terms of the GPL.” Licenses are freaking confusing :) but I think folks are correct to point this out. My understanding is that all of the new files the author wrote can individuals be licensed MIT, but unfortunately the work as a whole should be GPL.

        • qcoh · 2037 days ago

          From the FAQ, I don't get why the code has to be GPL licensed. It talks about libraries, "entire combinations", "software modules that link" and "work as a whole". On your second point: Can't they argue that they implement against an API, which could be provided by non-GPL software as well?

          • lvass · 2036 days ago

            Compatibility with GPL in this case simply means a software distributed in a compatible license like MIT can be combined and distributed under GPL [0]. >On your second point: Can't they argue that they implement against an API, which could be provided by non-GPL software as well? I don't think that is reasonable. A GPL program is specifically named in requirements.txt and imported. It's essentially the same as dynamic linking, that is no more than naming a program and using it's API. If this argument was valid one could also argue it's possible to modify a dynamically linked binary's rpath (can be easily done with patchelf on GNU/linux) from a GPL library to a non-GPL one so dynamically linking a library would never require you to do abide to it's license, which is obviously untrue [1]. [0] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic

        • Doctor_Fegg · 2037 days ago

          > writing their code against a GPL'd library constitutes creating a derivative work I’m not at all convinced that a court would agree, particularly when the effect on the code is fairly insubstantial.

      • coddle-hark · 2037 days ago

        Almost. The author can license their contributions with a more permissive license if they want (e.g. individual files can be MIT licensed) but the software as a whole must be licensed under the GPL. I guess it boils down to whether the LICENSE file is meant to apply to the code in that repo or the software it produces when built. I would expect the latter, but I guess it's a bit ambiguous since we're having this discussion.

  • lmm · 2037 days ago

    Coding against a library is usually understood to result in creating something that's a derivative work of that library.

    • moonchild · 2037 days ago

      The act of linking against a library produces a derivative work of that library. But since APIs are not copyrightable (in europe, at least), the act of using an API does not produce a derivative work, and thus code which uses an API is not bound to any particular license wrt it.

      • oezi · 2036 days ago

        There is a pretty clear line between using an API and using the code behind it. The line between an API and code describing and documenting that API is quite fine. See Google vs Oracle.

        • moonchild · 2036 days ago

          > See Google vs Oracle Google v oracle happened in the us. I explicitly qualified with ‘in europe’. That lawsuit would never have flown in the first place. Oracle's position was specifically that they held the copyright of the java stdlib APIs, which copyright was infringed upon by google. > code describing and documenting that API I'm not sure what you mean by that, can you clarify?

      • 40four · 2036 days ago

        I don’t understand what you mean. You can’t use the API without, in this case, importing it in the python code. That means you bring in a whole copy of the code into your project, or the API wouldn’t work, right? So, my understanding is the author’s new files that use the GPL licensed library can individually be licensed MIT, but the work as a whole must the GPL.

  • eek04_ · 2036 days ago

    It's not clear that the aggregate work is allowed to be distributed under the GPL. My legal hypothesis (from having worked with BSD licensed code and noticed how much hassle having many licenses is) is that the extra requirement of repeating the MIT license could be challenged against the "extra restrictions" clause of the GPL. Think of the case of having 500 variant MIT/BSD3-clause/et licenses that CLAIM to mean the same thing and need full reproduction; the cost of having lawyers verify this is substantial, so it is an actual substantial restriction. GNU believes that the lax licenses (MIT, advertising clause free BSD) are "compatible with GPL" because the GPL requires attribution and the licenses can be considered a form of attribution. The actual status of this has, to the best of my knowledge, not been tested in court. Because this is a claim from the group that wants to add restrictions (the GPL side) and they generally want to be able to take BSD code and apply extra restrictions to it, it's not clear it's a large risk in practice.

• yellowapple · 2037 days ago

  The Julia programming language does the exact same thing, last I checked (language itself is MIT-licensed, but the reliance on GPL-licensed math libraries makes the whole shebang GPL'd).

• antman · 2037 days ago

  Can easily be changed to rapidfuzz, which is based on the older 2011 MIT fuzzywuzzy before it was forced to GPL after incorporating python-levenstein. Also a lot faster. https://github.com/maxbachmann/RapidFuzz

• emosenkis · 2037 days ago

  It's written in Python... It never gets compiled or linked.

  • diarrhea · 2036 days ago

    Yeah this has me confused as well, why is nobody talking about that here? In Python, it's literally just a line of text, an instruction to import something. If that thing doesn't exist, too bad. The user is responsible for supplying it, not the Python code.

The disclaimer is a quote from DFV, DeepFuckingValue, from /r/wallstreetbets

I love this! Any interest in doing collab/would you care if I make this into a web app?

• druidmaster · 2037 days ago

  I think the point is that it's CLI based.

on a serious note, koyfin is really very nice and does a better job than Bloomberg, at least for equities

• aryc19 · 2037 days ago

  It looks promising. I was going to create an account to try it but then I stopped. Their privacy policy states I would have to send an email to delete my account data. Why do people make it harder to remove an account when the sign up process so easy?

  • minsc__and__boo · 2037 days ago

    I mean, the alternative costs $2,000/mo.

  • kolinko · 2037 days ago

    I have the same process on my site. The reason is that it is such a risky operation that you want to have a human in the middle as a safeguard from accidental deletion. Account cancellations and so on are automatic of course, but anything that can’t be rolled back requires human input.

    • aryc19 · 2036 days ago

      It guess it's not hard to put a deletion timer and send warning emails before actual deletion. Not every service out there requires you to send an email to delete your account.

      • kolinko · 2035 days ago

        And if you make a mistake there, your whole database evaporates and the business dies. It is possible, but it is expensive and risky to do it right. In my case there were perhaps five people that requested data deletion over the span of 8 years the site was working. Features that are so rarely used you don’t automate. Granted, I could’ve added a button that would send the e-mail automatically. It just honestly never crossed my mind - will implement it in future sites :)

• z2 · 2037 days ago

  US and Canadian equities, anyway, and while certainly important, leaves out half the world's market capitalization. Not bad for free! But Bloomberg's value proposition and justification for the insane price is that they are a maximum product for all financial data, news, and analytics, so that no MVP could possibly do more.

• benibela · 2036 days ago

  but does it have data about options?

"...that has been developed for fun, while I saw my GME shares tanking." "Spare time"... Wasn't that only several weeks ago? This is an incredible feature set! How many hours did you put into this?

• tgtweak · 2037 days ago

  From before Christmas.

• kebman · 2037 days ago

  It was "an overnight success" after practising for 15 years. :)

• iso1631 · 2036 days ago

  Initial commit was on Dec 20th, and wasn't that big before then https://github.com/DidierRLopes/GamestonkTerminal/blob/580e2...

How does an everyday person get the real time market data that this would theoretically need to invest to compete with a Bloomberg terminal?

• Judgmentality · 2037 days ago

  If you know a college student, there's a good chance they have one at the library.

• red2awn · 2037 days ago

  Most brokerages provide real time data to clients.

• SilverRed · 2037 days ago

  I'm not sure the everyday person actually can get or even handle real time data. I spoke to someone about 4 years ago who was doing it for their startup and they said they had serious problems handling the data volume. Talking about terabytes of data coming in per day. Typical DB systems fall apart under that kind of load.

  • remarkEon · 2037 days ago

    I'd like to understand a bit more about how Bloomberg Terminals are set up from an infrastructure perspective. Apologies if you don't know anything about that, but the idea that there's just "so much data" that only a Bloomberg Terminal can handle it seems kind of suspect to me. Don't we have other options? Or is this all proprietary?

    • nly · 2037 days ago

      The key their volume though is they don't really have hard latency constraints. Most of the data flowing through the Terminal is still for human eye balls and inaccurate or laggy data is tolerated. It's not a low latency product. They do have an API offering but you're unlikely to find serious trading shops using it except as a backup feed.

    • cmacleod4 · 2036 days ago

      Bloomberg operates a group of distributed, redundant data centres with massive compute and network infrastructure to ingest real-time data from every exchange and major market participant in the world, across a huge range of financial asset classes. It then fires the tiny subset of this that you happen to be interested in at any given moment down to your Bloomberg terminal. In addition there is data that only they have because it's generated as a by-product of their trading functionality. If I'm MegaBank Corp and I want to sell e.g. credit default swaps denominated in Norwegian Krone, I can advertise this by feeding my prices for such deals to Bloomberg so potential clients who also have a BB terminal can see them and click a price they like to make a trade. This gives Bloomberg a pool of liquidity/price info that no independent source has access to. So there are very strong network effects. Even if you could spend the billions to duplicate the infrastructure and rewrite all the software required, to actually do the same thing you would also need to replicate all the business relationships with data sources. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer/cat/financial-advisor/etc, but I used to be a developer at Bloomberg :-)

    • bradj · 2036 days ago

      There are lots of industry alternatives to Bloomberg, such as Refinitiv Eikon, FactSet, CapIQ, etc. There is a lot of technical infrastructure required to be able to constantly provide real-time data with no downtime. Also, some data sets are in fact proprietary. For example, Refinitiv has a historical database that can’t be beat by competitors because they were literally the only ones that started recording the data as early as they did. Anyone else who claims to have an equivalent data set just won’t have the same amount to provide.

  • sitzkrieg · 2037 days ago

    anyone can sign up for real-time data through many different providers of various quality. viewing real-time data and storing it on a per tick are two very different things. most software doesn't save it real-time. historical data is also requested from a provider as needed

• z2 · 2037 days ago

  Interestingly enough, as someone with both Bloomberg terminal and FactSet subscriptions, I still don't have real-time market data for most asset classes and securities. Those are actually add-on costs that I don't need for my research (I'm not a trader). The value for me (again not a trader) comes from having 25 years of robust fundamental and market data along with powerful portfolio analysis tools and models.

  • throwawaysea · 2037 days ago

    I guess I’m not very familiar with these offerings. I was really asking “how do I acquire a real time feed to plug into this open source software”. But it sounds like it’s not valuable to have that in practice?

    • ska · 2036 days ago

      No, it may or may not be particularly valuable depending on your use cases. Low latency data is mostly going to be a quality/cost/volume trade-off.

    • z2 · 2036 days ago

      I guess it depends on what you want to use the data for. There are plenty reasonably priced APIs for streaming the latest closing price once a second for, say, up to 5 stocks at a time. That's much more manageable than, say, streaming all 100,000 global stock and their transactions, bids, asks, closing prices, outstanding orders across multiple stock exchanges per stock, and 3-dimensional options data (strike price, expiration date, type). This may approach (but still be a few orders of magnitude less than) particle collider levels of data.

This is amazing But please implement a section for ALERTS! I want to make them configurable so eg whenever any stock goes up by more than its normal amount for the past week/month/configurable, I want to get an alert so I can buy call options, or put options for two months from now. Those usually jump 20,000%!

This makes all the hours (months really) I've wasted on HackerNews worth it. Thanks! Edit: I should say, it's things like this that make up for the wasted time. I've seen several really interesting things on here over time.

• addajones · 2037 days ago

  I wish I knew how to install it. I get so many errors and would be awesome if there was an easier way. I’m great at other things.. :/

Would you be interested in a PR for function to show market holidays? The terminal can pull the data from my site TradingHours.com.

This is amazing, thanks buddy.

Should probably rewrite it in rust, to solve the markets memory leaks, otherwise everything will keep going up.

• dragosmocrii · 2037 days ago

  this comment is underrated

• ralusek · 2037 days ago

  Markets are garbage collected.

  • cambalache · 2037 days ago

    Yeah, but that scheduling!

  • pbourke · 2037 days ago

    The market can leak memory longer than you can stay solvent. Or something.

    • hinkley · 2036 days ago

      A full garbage collection can be a brutal time.

• dan-robertson · 2037 days ago

  I realise this is a joke but there are economic reasons to expect stocks to go up in real terms on average in the long term. Investing in the long term is not a zero sum game.

  • zymhan · 2037 days ago

    No one here said anything to the contrary.

    • mvanaltvorst · 2037 days ago

      > solve [...], otherwise everything will keep going up This implies that markets going up is a problem that needs to be solved.

      • ldng · 2037 days ago

        Market going up when the economy is going down IS a problem because when it crashes it will amplify the problem ten fold.

        • feu · 2036 days ago

          Do you have any data to back up that assertion?

  • hahahahe · 2036 days ago

    That used to be case when you had to clear certain hurdles to IPO and stay listed. With the recent SPAC craze you no longer have to meet any of those. All you need is a credible narrative. In that environment, no, you shouldn’t expect stocks to have positive returns. Long-term positive return in stocks is purely a function of required rate of _cash_ return. But if an underlying business is never meant to ever distribute cash back to investors, the stock is worth exactly ZERO. In other words a ponzi scheme.

    • felipap · 2036 days ago

      You shouldn’t expect EVERY stock to have positive returns. Unless the bad stocks to which you're referring become a considerable part of the market, you should still expect stocks, on average, to earn you real interest.

• jldugger · 2037 days ago

  The borrow checker is still busted tho.

  • hinkley · 2036 days ago

    Not sure if short selling joke or Rust dig.

    • jldugger · 2036 days ago

      ¿Por qué no los dos?

• berkes · 2037 days ago

  I know you are joking. But asides from the securities offered by the typing system and borrow checker, Rust (and Go; and maybe others to some extend) have going for them is that the compiled binary is "OOTB". I'm on ubuntu, and it seems all python tooling is there to start running Gamestonks Terminal. But more often then not, getting a Python, Nodejs or Ruby project running requires a lot of fiddling, insider-information (what is npx, why did pipenv just break my entire desktop, why is this 'rbenv' thing giving these weird 'RVM' errors?). A rust project: download it, unzip it, run it. A very short Daft Punk song, really.

  • unixhero · 2036 days ago

    Daft Punk has split up, so it is no longer a valid meme.

    • nindalf · 2036 days ago

      That’s just like, your opinion man. See what I did? It’s an older meme, but it checks out.

      • hinkley · 2036 days ago

        Maybe your joke will be fine when Hell Freezes Over.

    • hinkley · 2036 days ago

      Just wait for the 2025 reunion tour.

  • infairverona · 2036 days ago

    Aren't PAR files meant to address that?

    • berkes · 2036 days ago

      Probably. As would appimg or snap or any other packaging. But all of these don't make the packaging easier, they merely move the complexity of such setups from "all users" to "the devs". Which helps a lot. But it's still easier if no-one has to deal with this.

  • hinkley · 2036 days ago

    Long ago I had lucid reasons why Sass was better than Less in very important ways, but over time it became "but not worth the trouble of maintaining a Ruby distribution on your machine" The c implementation didn't hit the point of me being able to endorse it before I just gave up and let people use Less if that's what they prefer. Runtimes, man. They can be the pits.

  • eclat · 2036 days ago

    ASDF requires nearly the same amount of effort for every language

The only thing that this shares with the bloomberg terminal is that it can do equities and is on a terminal. Sort of irks me because a bloomberg terminal can do so much more: level 2 data, trading capability, damn near instant news alerts, options, debt instrumentals + so much more - and I get it, this isn't meant for that same crowd and this is pretty well flushed out for a retail investor. But the comparison with the bloomberg terminal is a bit of a head scratcher

• schoen · 2037 days ago

  Maybe it's like a Bloomberg terminal as of a few decades ago? I think access to market data is a challenge in trying to replicate more of the present-day Bloomberg terminal. First because it's so voluminous (as people elsewhere in this thread have said), and second because so much of it is commonly provided under license for a fee (and with nondisclosure obligations) (and also subject to the trend where people pay more to get or generate market data that's closer to real-time). But in terms of the feature competition, I think people have upvoted this so much because it's an initial version of a single person's passion project that manages to put a whole bunch of financial information at your fingertips. With an active community (and modulo the important data access issues), it could easily grow and grow and grow in functionality.

  • Cullinet · 2036 days ago

    a couple of decades ago the bloomberg was massively more than that already

• kolinko · 2037 days ago

  Brittanica also had much more than Wikipedia. And Unix could do much more than Linux. This is how great open source begins.

• twic · 2036 days ago

  Also, this looks like it's purely for equities - no bonds, futures, options, swaps, etc. I suspect that by volume of risk traded by users (not purely through the terminal), equities are a minority of what the Bloomberg terminal supports. Still, this is a cool hack. I understand that it is not a genuine attempt to unseat Bloomberg!

  • adeelk93 · 2036 days ago

    I know, I got excited when I saw the headline, only to discover it’s yet another equity-only tool

Those bloomberg systems could do video. There were people who made significantly more than beer money assisting dealing room people to watch otherwise not broadcast en clair games, on their terminal, alongside the stocks. I was not one of them. I have spoken to people who were, many aeons ago in the days of kipper ties, wide lapels and double brested suits, with padded shoulders. Shiny suits.

Maybe now I can finally start to get into algo trading.

How good does this work for non US stocks? I don't think you should invest all your money in stocks of just one nation.

• greatpatton · 2037 days ago

  You can trade shares of companies from all around the world on US stock exchange.

  • grenoire · 2037 days ago

    You can trade global depository receipts* of companies from all around the world.

    • findthewords · 2036 days ago

      That's what money is.

  • stewbrew · 2027 days ago

    I wish you luck trying to sell your shares from some unknown European company in the US that nobody in the US wants to buy.

• throwaway2037 · 2036 days ago

  What percentage of profits in the S&P 500 index do you think comes from outside the United States? The nice thing about S&P 500, EuroSTOXX 50, and Nikkei 225 indices: A huge portion of their profits come from outside their home regions: US, EU(rope), Japan. Think: FAANG, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, NVidia, HP, Ford, Boeing, Phillip Morris, Tesla, Siemens, EADS, Phillips, NXP Semi, Alstom, ABB, SAP, Santander, Volvo, Volkswagon, Hitachi, Panasonic, Toyota, Kyocera, Nintendo, Sony, etc. Upon closer inspection, they act like international indices. Don't bother with indices focused upon developing economies -- they are already covered by the Big Three indices! My take: Of these Big Three indices, the S&P 500 will outperform others over the long term. That is not blind pro-US bias. The US economy (and, correspondingly, the S&P 500 index) is much more dynamic than EU and Japan. It can recover faster after downturns -- recessions & depressions. <snark> As a retail investor, put your money into a very low commission ETF that tracks the S&P 500 index. See: Fidelity, State Street, or Vanguard. Enable dividend reinvestment programme ("DRIP") to buy more shares with dividends. Go to sleep for 30 years. Wake up rich. Simples. </snark>

I like the software...

Nice, needs more black though. Bloombergs were all about the original dark mode.

Strong! Many have tried before you.

Wow this is so cool! Now I can't understand most of these things so it'd be cool to have a video of someone using the tool and explaining what one can get from it : )

For stocks Bbg is overkill. A stock investor basically needs latest PR, SEC and earnings release info for his watchlist of stocks, which can be done using Feedly and Seeking Alpha. Alerts connected to the watchlists ("high volume on stock at new high in this watchlist") would be useful but I haven't found anything with that. Finviz is good for charts, although it doesn't have log charts (at least in the free version). That's basically it. Yahoo Finance was brilliant while it lasted.

The article on the potential of making the alternative to Bloomberg Terminal and the corresponding HN discussions [1][2]. [1] https://marker.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-kill-the-bloomberg... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23891161

He had me at "I am not a cat" in the disclaimer.

Check out AlleAktien Quantitativ (attn: it's German but it's 100% free) and they'll translate it to other languages, soon: https://www.alleaktien.de/quantitativ/

• hdra · 2037 days ago

  that looks interesting. it certainly has many of the stuff that I'm looking for. Do you know how "soon" are they gonna be translating it into other languages? and if you happen to know German, is there any mention of where are they getting their data?

  • Cu3PO42 · 2036 days ago

    As far as I can tell they make no mention of where exactly they are getting their data, but they claim to update multiple times daily and review all data manually. They also say the following: > Uns blieb bei der Aktienanalyse oft keine andere Wahl, als unzählige Geschäftsberichte der vergangenen 20 Jahre zu öffnen und dort die gesuchten Daten manuell und mühsam viele Stunden herauszusuchen. The essence of which is that in the past they often manually extracted data from the last twenty years of annual reports from a given company. Maybe that's still how they're doing it.

I’m not a coder. This looks awesome and I’d really love to try it. Can anyone tell me how to get this working or point me to a set of instructions? I see the code and read me on GitHub but don’t know what to do next. Thank you.

• franga2000 · 2037 days ago

  From a quick glance, the first thing you'll need to do is install Python for your platform. There are a bunch available, but for Windows I usually recommend WinPython. This one should be good: https://sourceforge.net/projects/winpython/files/WinPython_3... . Run that and select an empty folder to install it into. When it's done, open the folder and run the "WinPython Command Prompt". Once you have that, download the code (green button "Download as ZIP") and extract it into your WinPython folder. Go into it by typing "cd GamestonkTerminal" into the terminal and press enter. The terminal should indicate you're now in that folder. Once there, run the following command: "pip -r install". This wil take some time to complete, during which you can follow the links in the "API Keys" section of the Readme and follow whatever steps they require for you to get an API key (probably have to register an account, create an "application" and create a key - it'll usually be a long random-looking string of characters). Once you have the keys, edit the "config_terminal.py" using notepad or preferably Notepad++ and put the corresponding keys where "REPLACE_ME" is at the end of each line (keep the quotes!). If you've done all that, go back to the command prompt from before and run "python ganestonk_terminal.py". The terminal should be running.

  • soniman · 2036 days ago

    Thanks

  • alexhogset · 2036 days ago

    Hi! I get two errors; 1) no such option: -r 2) Permission denied when using Git HUB Yes i'm a noob.

    • franga2000 · 2036 days ago

      1) I'm an idiot. It's "pip install -r requirements.txt". Don't know how I messed that one up. 2) Permission denied where? I'm not sure what scenario on GitHub could possibly lead to that. I did try and install it myself and it turned out to be significantly more annoying than expected (on Linux, mind you, so it might be easier on Win). I didn't actually get it to run because after an hour, I had other things to do.

  • Thoraco · 2036 days ago

    n00b here as well... WinPython install completed. Ran WinPython Command Prompt. Extracted zip folder to WinPython folder. Typed in "cd Gamestonk Terminal" (with and without "s). Result: The system cannot find the path specified. Terminal seems to have opened with scripts folder in command line. Any ideas?

    • Thoraco · 2036 days ago

      NM, I just copied the GS folder contents into the scripts and ran the requirements.txt. Thanks for your post though!

TradingView is more than good for most users

• neop1x · 2037 days ago

  And they even have a wonderful Pine scripting to script new indicators and strategies! TradingView can be quite memory hungry sometimes but page refresh helps in such cases.

The biggest thing you pay for in the Bloomberg Terminal is the chat function, which lets you talk to other people who also have $25,000 a year to spend on a Bloomberg Terminal. But this is still pretty cool :)

• blurbleblurble · 2037 days ago

  This has that too, it's called "reddit"