Hi,

I'm the founder of Tiingo and just saw a huge influx of users! Thank you HN!

I 100% agree with you. The podcasts are there for educational purposes and I try my best to emphasize the limits of quantitative modeling and backtesting. I was a former quant trader and saw experienced people make the same mistakes.

My goal on the site is therefore give tools, but not recommendations. It's the reason I don't associate with brokerages either, I want the data to be unbiased as possible.

My hope is that newcomers and experienced individuals alike come onboard and listen to the podcasts that emphasize just this.

In terms of pricing strategy, I will be enforcing a minimum $1/month floor coming in the next couple weeks.

But either way, people deserve so much better and I'm going to try my best to make sure the tools and information remain intellectually honest.

-Rishi

Hi Rishi,

I'm a current student so please forgive my naiveté of any real-world implementations.

You mentioned "My goal on the site is therefore give tools, but not recommendations."

Do you have any plans to offer portfolio construction tools? I took a portfolio construction class which used Andrew Ang's book as a theoretical basis and was struck at how simple it appeared to create [insert weighting scheme here] portfolios.

I think though a platform could go a step further and demonstrate how to execute different strategies that appear to be only executable by hedge funds. i.e. can you show [insert publicly-tradable assets] which when bought together appear to replicate a hedge fund's beta (maybe not HFRI but some sort of market-neutral beta)?

I dunno it just feels there's a lot that can be done to remove the mysticism from wealth management and open data is just the beginning of such a movement.

I've met Rishi @ Tiingo a few times and the fact of the matter is he is super passionate about liberating financial data and tools. I think that his pricing model and generosity are truly born from his genuine interest and love of the product. Seems strange, but its true! Hey anything to break up the 2.5k/mo bloomberg stranglehold....

its a zero sum game though- i guess the charity is in leveling the playing field a little bit?

People are already pissing away their 401k thinking they can strike it rich and beat the market because they successfully backtested against some tick data on 50 symbols, paid some offshorer a few hundred dollars to implement their trading algorithm against IB or in NinjaTrader on a high margin and no limit orders. Trust me, people have been trying to 'beat the market' competing against the Renaissances and PIMCOs for ages.

E-trade arguably does just as much damage, letting an average end user (who often lacks the industry experience of both the financial industry as well as the company in which they choose to invest) throw their money into anything. A VC once said he knew the Web 1.0 boom was over when his cabbie told him to invest in Cisco.

I, for one, think that the Bloomberg reign -of-terror can't end soon enough. They're as bad as Elsevier in monopolizing information. Information can be used properly or improperly in any context[1]. You want to see some real damage? Give that demographic access to Q/KDB+ and let them underwrite a 20x inter-day margin with their mortgages.

[1]Go to any o-chem forum and you'll see tons of graduate students talking about research chemical drug synthesis techniques, precursor availability, ways around DEA watched-chemical lists, etc. It's vaguely masked in their own lexicon, but it's plain as day.

Edit: By throwing away ones 401k, I meant "cashing out their 401k and effectively gambling on a handful of stocks". Low-load / no-load 401k's and (Roth) IRAs are way safer prospective investments often with useful tax benefits. I keep my 401k with Vanguard and they explicitly say "Very few Vanguard funds charge fees when you buy and sell shares. The fees are designed to help those funds cover higher transaction costs and protect long-term investors by discouraging short-term, speculative trading." which is a mentality that most people should adopt. https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/fees

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

> People are already pissing away their 401k thinking they can strike it rich and beat the market

Not really? I mean, sure, maybe a few are, but on the whole 401(k) returns are actually shockingly good considering the level of control people have over them. Default target-date funds work really well.

How did your funds perform during the 2008 crash?