Ask HN: How do you monitor financial markets?

[maximedb]

Hi HN,

How do you monitor financial markets?

I used to have a Bloomberg Terminal license at my previous job. Now that is gone, I lack a good tool to monitor markets (like WEI<Go>/WB<Go>/GMM<Go>). Or something similar to the launchpad?

Which app/website do you guys use?

Thank you,

Maxime.

[arthurcolle]

Koyfin is decent. It does not have good terminal commands like BBG unfortunately. It is surprising that no good extensible alternatives exist, but I suppose this is part of Bloomberg's cachet. I used BBG at Goldman when I was working in agency CMO structuring and it is definitely powerful, but I found it a little annoying that there was no API I could write scripts against. I moved laterally from technology to trading and there was massive hesitance from partners higher up to allow lateral moves to still have developer access in general, so that was an unfortunate situation all around.

[maximedb]

Thanks, I will check it out. There are a few python wrappers around Bloomberg APIs. For example: https://github.com/kyuni22/pybbg. It mimicks the Bloomberg Excel formulas (BDP, BDH, BDS). Quite powerfull. But you can hit the daily limit easily (500,000 data points per day max). They released the Bloomberg Query Language (BQL) that you can use to make larger queries. But not all FLDS fields are available yet... They also provide BQNT, a jupyter notebook where you can run BQL queries and share "apps" with your colleagues.

[Bostonian]

If you have an Interactive Brokers account (real money or test) you can use Traders Workstation, and IB also has an API that lets you pull data. There is an active mailing list https://groups.io/g/twsapi .