You can pay $30,000 a year for a Bloomberg terminal. Or you can visit the Stavros Niarchos library in midtown Manhattan where there are three available to use for free. 

I dropped by recently. It was the first time I’ve touched one of the boxes coveted by Wall Street since I left the company in 2022. I had worked there for three decades.

It felt like I was visiting a place from childhood. It was familiar, but I was different. 

I tried out the functions I spearheaded when I was Global Head of News Product, including the integration of Twitter into the terminal, as well as content from the New York Times and Washington Post. My group built an innovative news summarization engine and feature to chart the volume of coverage that worked better than Google Trends. 

I was glad to see those features still working even after a number of years.

The big surprise was that the terminal showed little evidence of incorporating generative AI, which burst on the scene more than a year ago.

There are plenty of startups aiming to provide easier-to-navigate platforms for financial analysis. They have moved quickly to incorporate the technology championed by OpenAI. Demos provide a sense of the opportunity.

Three that have stood out to me are OpenBB, FinChat and DoTadda.

All three integrate generative AI, applying it to pre-defined data sets such as financial results and conference call transcripts. Those guardrails improve accuracy and limit hallucinations. 

No startup is going to replace Bloomberg anytime soon for a myriad of reasons, including the stickiness of vendor agreements and the need for enterprise-level reliability and global customer service.   

But they show what’s possible.

OpenBB was founded by Didier Lopes with $8.8 million in funding, including money from Naval Ravikant and Elad Gil. It is an open-sourced terminal that allows users to do investment research in multiple asset classes for free.

FinChat was started by Braden Dennis. The company just got $1.5 million in funding from VC Social Leverage. The site incorporates AI to let users ask complex questions based on the data. So far it only handles equities, but the interface is slick and intuitive and includes KPI and segment data.

DoTadda was created by Andrew Meister. It’s a note taking summarization analysis engine aimed at Wall Street analysts, especially those that work in teams. The platform allows groups to load links and documents like transcripts and apply AI to analyze them. 

So many analysts on the Street would benefit from a system like this to share content and draw insights. (Full disclosure: I am on DoTadda’s advisory board.)

None of these or the many other startups leveraging OpenAI to build new products to analyze markets pose an immediate or existential threat to Bloomberg, FactSet or Thompson Reuters.

But they are worth checking out if you want to understand where we are headed and what’s possible for financial analysis with generative AI technology.  

(Part of a series of lessons I learned from three decades working at Bloomberg LP)