Why the world needs SimFin…and why I joined.
“They cost how much!?!”
I still remember where I was in IE’s Master in Finance program when I learned about the Bloomberg Terminal business model. I’d used the terminals some throughout my undergrad degree, various internships in Manhattan and Shanghai, and was currently earning a certification from Bloomberg themselves when a rep repeated-
“$2,000 per month to lease the machine and that comes with…”
As she droned on about how their great support network made up for the terrible price I couldn’t help but think that there had to be a better way.
Welcome to the Shitty/Awesome Spectrum
The Shitty/Awesome Spectrum pops up in every industry. Before investments in water treatment infrastructure, tap water was shitty and Evian was expensive. Before Khanacademy it was a library card vs classes and tutors. And before Twitter and LinkedIn it was your personal network vs country club fees.
Financial information is no different. Google Finance and Yahoo Finance are free tools with limited manipulability and ease of access. Bloomberg, FactSet, and Reuters are expensive subscription models with highly manipulable data that restricts logins to certain machines and IP’s.
We’re building SimFin to break the spectrum.
What SimFin does
SimFin provides an open-source, platform-agnostic, free database of all publicly listed US (and soon, all) companies. We’ve also tried to keep it as buzzword free as possible.
Take Tesla Motors for example. Currently undergoing a potential acquisition of Solarcity you might want to take a look at the financials of TSLA. Can they handle this acquisition? Will a better company result? To even begin asking the right questions we need a diagnosis based on fundamental analysis.
You could bang your head against Google Finance or the PDF of Tesla’s actual financial statements. And if you’re one of the solid gold losers who actually owns a Bloomberg Terminal odds are you aren’t reading this.
Or you could hop over to SimFin and search TSLA.
That took 25 seconds.
Want to look up an executive’s information like, for example, Elon Musk? Just search his name and see a profile of all the bot/user uploaded data currently on the platform.
This is only the first iteration of SimFin. Obviously there will be bugs. We have a long way to improve but we’re excited for a number of reasons.
Why SimFin matters
During graduate school my team and I won the CFA Institute Research Challenge. We would not have won had we not had access to multiple Bloomberg Terminals and knew how to use them. Most individual investors don’t. Most business school students don’t.
We live in a digital age. Information is a commodity and the only barrier to education should be your own curiosity. It’s downright criminal that our society charges for publicly available information to truly be available.
SimFin is free to use, free to share, and free to download/upload data. The database is built by our proprietary crawler-bot and our community of users. And as a user you become a financial author.
If you’re a professor, an investor, or a student — we built SimFin for you.
This is the Gutenberg Moment for financial literacy.
Who is SimFin
We are a distributed team operating in Germany, Spain, and the US. We are graduates of finance and STEM programs. We are winners of the CFA Institute Research Challenge. We are coders, bankers, and students. We are a group passionate about free, robust tools. And we fight for the user.
We hope you’ll join us.
If you liked this article or what we’re doing, please hit that little heart button so that more people can see this.
You can also head over to SimFin.com and access all the data you want! And I should clarify, this is another thing I’m doing instead of sleeping. Still have a full-time job. #hustle
