[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.

[brobinson]

You should be able to get it directly from your broker. My broker gave me their historical data downloader for free after I made a large deposit with them, and I was able to download T1 (tick) data for ten currencies pairs for the last five years with it.