June 4, 2026
Stocks, shocks, and server drama
Show HN: Open Terminal – A Bloomberg Style App for Research
Aiming to bring Wall Street data to everyone, but commenters roasted the speed
TLDR: Open Terminal wants to give everyday investors the kind of deep company research usually locked behind pricey Wall Street tools. Commenters liked the idea but piled on over slow loading, broken features, and a launch-day server struggle that turned the comment thread into the real spectacle.
A new app called Open Terminal showed up promising something huge: Bloomberg-style company research for regular people, not just rich finance pros with expensive tools. The pitch is simple and pretty appealing — company numbers, market news, public filings, charts, and even an artificial intelligence helper, all in one place. In theory, it’s the kind of thing that could make investing feel less like guessing and more like actually knowing what you’re buying.
But Hacker News did what Hacker News does best: it immediately turned into a live reaction show. The biggest mood? Cool idea, rough first impression. One commenter delivered the opening slap by saying you can now spot an AI-generated website in “0.4s,” basically accusing the project of having that polished-but-soulless startup vibe before even getting to the product. Then came the pain points: slow loading, broken features on Firefox, buttons that seemed to do nothing, and a general feeling that a finance app should be snappy, not gasping for air under pressure.
And yes, there was comedy. One user skipped past all modern app expectations and asked, essentially, why isn’t this just a terminal-style text app so it can be fast? That’s peak internet nerd energy. The plot twist: the founder jumped into the comments and admitted the app was getting crushed by traffic from the post itself, saying the server buckled and the virtual machine needed resizing. So the real drama wasn’t whether people want democratized finance tools — they clearly do. It was whether this one could survive its own big debut.
Key Points
- •Open Terminal is presented as a financial research app designed to give individual investors easier access to professional-style company research.
- •The platform combines SEC financial data, live market news, company summaries, charting, AI-based question answering, and SQL access in one interface.
- •The article describes six core tools: Financials, Companies, Quadrant, News, AI, and SQL.
- •The Companies tool supports searching more than 10,000 public companies and reviewing summaries, filings, and related news.
- •Open Terminal was built by Tesseract Analytics founder Alex Dolotov, whose background includes mathematics, MIT's MicroMasters in Data and Economics, and studies at BCIT.