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Is there an alternative to Bloomberg for someone who only needs historical data (stocks, futures, indices) as well as what Bloomberg calls 'reference data' - i.e. what is the multiplier of ESU4, what is the ticker of the 3rd VIX future, what is the cost of a given ETF, etc.

Most providers I have found only supply historical price data and not much else.

Thanks in advance!

philmo
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    Have you tried FactSet and/ or Reuters? They both do things that are similar to Bloomberg in terms of providing data. I am not sure of the pricing, but they should both be slightly cheaper than Bloomberg. – user7360 Feb 25 '14 at 23:46
  • Why do you need an alternative? Do you need some data that is not available in Bloomberg? Is it a cost issue? – assylias Feb 26 '14 at 00:50
  • @assylias Yes this is a cost issue. We are trying to reduce costs and seeing as we only use Bloomberg for data access, I am trying to find a suitable alternative for our purposes. – philmo Feb 26 '14 at 15:42
  • If you have a colleague you could download these (static) reference data once. In terms of the contract table of the futures (Bloomberg: CT) you could program an "algorithmus" that estimates the upcoming contracts. – Markus Feb 26 '14 at 21:00
  • @Markus Thanks for the tips. In-house solution is definitely a solution, but ideally, I am just looking for an alternative to reduce costs. Just haven't come across anything that fits the bill. – philmo Feb 26 '14 at 21:45
  • How about Reuter's Eikon? They are trying hard to unseat Bloomberg, so who knows you might score a sweet deal with them. – silencer Feb 27 '14 at 05:27
  • I have had good luck with S&P Xpressfeed for equities. – ontic Mar 25 '21 at 12:48
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    Does this answer your question? What data sources are available online? – Alper Aug 29 '23 at 05:52

6 Answers6

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Here is what you can definitely use: Thomson Reuters Eikon

Sason Torosean
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Market data for professional users is generally much more expensive than retail so Bloomberg might not be a bad deal in the end. As for alternatives consisting of both data and data store:

  • $0 for Axibase TSD on single node (my affiliation)
  • $699 + exch. fees for polygon.io delayed feed for all US exchanhes (no affiliation)

Another idea, at least for equities, is to use delayed IEX TOPS archives. They're zero cost and are updated shortly after midnight UTC. Most trades are within the NBBO spread. Average volume is 300M shares, 3M trades, $20B per day.

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Sergei Rodionov
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IMHO, the best data provider outside of Bloomberg for those who are comfortable with programmatic access is TickData.com. You can get enormous amounts of future and stock data. They have API access. You can customise how you do rolls. They have an API. You can work with AWS. It's professional grade data with professional access and data cleaning / customisation options.

R110
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try also Datastream. but at the end it really depends on the type of financial data that you need.

ℕʘʘḆḽḘ
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If you are a quant fund, algoseek.com is the data vendor worth checking out.

Algoseek provides comprehensive, professional intraday and end-of-day market data products designed especially for quants and machine learning. For example, their equity Trade+Quote minute bar has around 80 data points, providing detailed information on market dynamics and microstructure.

Algoseek data products cover the major asset classes including equities, futures and options. They provide both historical data and updates.

Amanda
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For daily futures prices via ftp download, my experience overall with https://www.csidata.com/ was very good. They provide all the metadata you need via a simple web API. I'd typically download metadata (and update my RDBMs) each weekend. They also bundle their data in a retail-oriented Windows application, which is probably cheaper, but I have no experience with that.

CSIdata definitely is NOT a general purpose "Bloomberg alternative". But just for daily futures data, it's BETTER. Bloomberg is very comprehensive, but CSIData is better organized, easier to work with, and also much cheaper.

atp
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