Bloomberg Open Sources Previously Proprietary Security Identifier Universe

One of the key unique premium features of Bloomberg, its universe of proprietary ID codes for securities in the stock, bond, options and other financial verticals, is going freeware. The entire data set can be now used by anybody at the following website: http://bsym.bloomberg.com. While unique pricing data will not be available (at least not yet, but give it a few weeks before some enterprising entrepreneur plugs this into some free pricing data feed), and even though CDS data still seems to be missing, this is a curious step by Bloomberg which heretofore has guarded its security universe dataset with religious zeal.

The site allows users to look up descriptive information on an issuer or industry sector, and will provide information including feed sources and unqiue Bloomberg unique ID codes.

Yet reading between the lines of this action indicates it is not the act of altruism it may initially seem to be. As Securities Industry News points out:

“Bloomberg’s free access to ID codes could give it a competitive edge
over other data vendors and make it an industry standard,” says Ed
Ventura, president of Ventura Management Associates, a Princeton, N.J.
consultancy specializing in data management issues. Thomson Reuters,
for one, does charge for the use and distribution of its proprietary
Reuters Identification Codes (RICs) through licensing fees to their
data feeds.

On its bsym.bloomberg.com website Bloomberg touted the merits of its
free strategy over those of its competitors. “Other organizations
assert proprietary rights over their identifiers, impose significant
limitations on their use and either charge users license fees or
include their symbology licenses with the purchase of related
products,” said Bloomberg. By contrast, Bloomberg “users would be able
to use the identifiers for a variety of uses including trading,
research, and mapping.” Bloomberg went on to say that an effective
symbology for any class of instrument must have broad coverage, be
widely available at a low cost, flexible enough for use in multiple
functions, allow mapping to alternative symbologies used in related
functions, and be dynamic enough to immediately account for the many
instruments that arise, expire, and change on a daily basis,” wrote
Bloomberg on the bsym.bloomberg website. “Bloomberg believes that its
BSYM will satisfy all of these requirements.”

As the investing world moves away from increasingly illiquid equities and to the liquidity provided by bonds and credit derivatives, S&P's CUSIP methodology (at least in the realm of cash bonds) has reigned supreme. What Bloomberg is attempting to do is to muscle in on and expand the lucrative securities identification business. Which, with at least 4 different securities tracking services out there, is not a bad idea, although it is likely just a matter of time before it is reverse engineered and streamed as free data. Hopefully the future re-repeat Mayor has done his math well on this one.

Comments

[bugs_]

Deep Shah's brother - Open Shah.

[Cheeky Bastard]

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA total win +10000

[marctmiller]

so they essentially made their "dictionary" available to the public??? 

what's the big deal?

[Anonymous]

All your bsym are belong to us.

[Anonymous]

All your bsym are belong to us.

[Anal_yst]

For those of us w/out a BBG terminal at our desks, this is definitely a positive (balls in your court, ThompsonReuters.  After just a quick glance, the  bbg offering is  better than someof Reuters, albeit slightly older, pay-to-play services)

[You Cant Handle...]

Antitrust pressure from a Gov't that isn't happy with a certain Bloomberg lawsuit?  Inquiring minds want to know.

[Anonymous]

Has anyone considered the possibility of Bloomberg data mining this information for either a "firewalled" prop desk or to sell a real time feed of the searching and charting to private firms with prop desks. Even without tracking by ISP or other techniques to see exactly who is doing what, the sheer search volume could easily be collated to provide a crowd wisdom picture.

Essentially this is similar, though less specifically and individually targeted, than what this website previously accused the vampire squid of doing a little while ago.

Yes individual people could not be front run, but if this becomes the industry standard then much of the wave in any real push could be run. Or at least to the tinfoil hat crowd, it could be second string front run after the people who manipulate the market in the first instance.

P.S. these captchas are still way too easy

[Anonymous]

A prop desk at Bloomberg mining data to front run the market?

Interesting, but I think this site has now officially gone overboard on the conspiracy theories!!

[Anonymous]

CDS data on bloomberg is a pile of shit anyway...

[Nolsgrad]

I'm still not seeing any pricing on this sucker, am I missing something?

[Anonymous]

what's the big deal

[CJ Fields]

BBERG already mines the crap out of you as a user-if you think you are doing something unique, pretty sure they are out hawking it to every other person on the system.  TR's RIC codes still have a lot more based on enterprise and global presence-but this definately will cause some ripples

[Anonymous]

Any ideas how this can be used for (layman's terms if possible)? What free sources can this data be married to? I am not seeing the value here (as I'm not in investment profession). I am a data guy who can slice/dice/integrate any data hence my interest.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Any ideas how this can be used for (layman's terms if possible)? What free sources can this data be married to? I am not seeing the value here (as I'm not in investment profession). I am a data guy who can slice/dice/integrate any data hence my interest.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

After a few trys of trying to make sense of the headline, I realized that a hyphen is needed between "open" and "sources."