Comment by kaashif
4 years ago
Surely it's some kind of trademark infringement or something to call your Bloomberg competitor "OpenBB". That seems obviously designed to mislead people into thinking it's something to do with Bloomberg.
If it were just some meme project fine, but they are apparently taking investment [1], and investors generally expect to make money. Making money from misleading people into thinking you're backed by the market leader...uhh...seems risky.
I spent half a decade in finance and know my way around a Bloomberg terminal, and I don't think I've ever heard “BB” used as shorthand for Bloomberg. When I see it, I think BlackBerry.
Sure, but you see "financial terminal" you're already thinking Bloomberg. Then you see "OpenBB" and by that point what else could "BB" stand for?
I mean that as a legitimate question, what are they even claiming "BB" stands for? I actually can't find it.
They are also using stock data from Yahoo Finance and IEX Cloud as their data sources. It is misleading to use IEX because you are only getting 2-3% of volume being that IEX is a very small stock exchange. Using Yahoo Finance may be more accurate but the exchanges will not take kindly to using scraped data like that. There are very strict compliance and audit requirements for dealing with any of the exchanges, and the data costs a ton. I have seen a lot of projects pull together a bunch of random "free" data sources without regard for their licensing or terms. I can't understand how this is even comparable to Bloomberg when there is no live data feed and the data source is questionable at best. I hope their investors aren't blindly believing their marketing.
Being a free and open project I'm not sure how they would ever use a paid data feed though, the market data industry is just not compatible with that model unfortunately.
Under which authority could Yahoo finance legally restrict access to the stock data if on the technical side the website and information is public and doesn't require authentication?
Just because information is public doesn't mean it can be used without restriction, similar to how certain open source licenses doesn't allow you to do anything you want with the code just because you can view it on GitHub. For example, website owners will realize this quickly when they copy an image from Google Images and get a lawyer letter demanding payment for unlicensed usage.
In this case, Yahoo licenses the data from various exchanges. I am not sure which exchange they use (some sites often use a cheaper exchange like one of the CBOE exchanges, rather than licensing the entire consolidated tape, which is the combination of all exchanges and gives the most official and up to date pricing). The exchanges are very particular about distribution rights and sites pay a pretty penny (we are talking probably tens of thousands per month for a single data source) to access it. I am not sure exactly what legal method the use to "shut down" unauthorized, access, but they can and do depending on how serious they are (for example, NYSE may be the strictest and does regular audits).
Of course, exchanges understand that their intellectual property can and will be reproduced when it is offered for "free" through public websites, so that is factored into the cost that websites pay and for the most part everyone turns a blind eye to small personal use. However when you use it commercially or build a project (even free) around their IP, you can expect them to take a second look at some point. Exchanges make a killing on this I am sure, as they charge admin fees, monthly data fees, fees per user/visitor, and all kind of other clever things. To learn more look up "<market> Fee schedule" (where market = CTA or UTP for consolidated US equities, OPRA for options, CME for futures, etc) and you can find the licensing rates that most exchanges publish (which doesn't include the rates you will pay to a data vendor to actually get the data).
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