If you are a private investor not employed by a financial institution you can get a hobbled, but still surprisingly inclusive version of Reuters Eikon for $150/Month/$1500/yr - Google Metastock Xenith. Fabulous deal for the price HTH. Note: Advance warning. Set the country for symbols to US if you are a US stock trader so that you just type the exchange symbol without the Reuters suffix (otherwise you will go mad)
Lol @ money.net as a Bloomberg comparison. The problem with all non-Bloomberg products is that they offer very little value that you can't scrape Yahoo Finance or other free providers. Bloomberg has an OEMS platform for trading (if you trade across multi-brokers), gives you quotes (fixed income, fx, commodities, derivatives (not just options), equities, etc.) on a global scale, is a primary data source for you to collect economic and financial data (easier to use than FRED, plus more extensive), has an excellent support staff that'll do almost anything for you, and has fantastic portfolio analytics (free up to 50 portfolios). That's not even including their news (top notch), industry analysis (via BI, top notch), bEST's, being able to create your own indicators/formulas, sense of community, and more. ~2k/mo is a bargain for what they offer. If you can afford it, get it. If not, suck it up and use Thomson Eikon (gives you prices but very little data, historical economic & financial, very little intelligence, weak portfolio analytics, etc.).
You obviously love BB, and much of what you say about BB is true. However, it is disturbing that for some futures contracts they mix rollover data with regular auction data, which. of course, makes proper analysis impossible. For example, the auction volume for a 1 minute period in the Nikkei Mini is 1000 contracts, and during the same minute 3000 contracts are rolled over. In this case the volume bar will show 4000 contracts. The price will also display the rollover price. This is obviously wrong. The reason for this is that when OSE changed their system years ago they changed the symbol for the rollover data flag in the data feed. Either they didn't inform the vendors of the change or it was not clear in the exchange's instructions. So the result was that the rollover data was not filtered from the auction data. Now this problem was not limited to BB. Reuters, CQG etc. also failed to adjust their programs. When I brought this error to the attention of IB and eSignal, they fixed the problem right away.. Reuters recognized the problem and said they would fix it. But still haven't due to what they recently said is a matter of priorities. What's more important than correct data, I don't know!! BB, surprisingly, couldn't seem to understand the problem and could do no better than to say "We can customize the data for you if you don't want rollover data mixed in with auction data". It would seem that correcting the data should be the first step for them. But what was really surprising was that BB did everything possible to avoid admitting that their data was wrong and had been so to many years. So, as for BB's data in other cases, the above leaves doubts.
Well, they aren't perfect. Good point about accuracy of data, though. I come from an i-banking background and am used to having to verify statement and economic info, but tick data is a lot more intense.
PS Chinese competitor for Bloomberg is Great Wisdom/ DZH, I don't think they operate outside of China.
There seems to be DZH international: http://dzhintl.com/news-research.php http://dzhintl.com/financial-terminal-advisorpro.php Do you know wether the mainland version comes in english, and wether it is really a good source of data and news for world equities ? From the link below it appears the news feed is only about China, Singapore and Malaysia listed stocks, and thenews are in mandarin when it comes to chinese stocks. Is that the product you mean as it is geographically very limited to compete with Bloomberg ? http://dzhintl.com/financial-terminal-advisorpro.php?nav=pc
http://home.quodd.com/ was used in Billions series 2 episode 11, (one of the best trading depictions and plot twists since Trading Places). Don't know how much Quodd is maybe someone could report back. Billions is on torrent.