The depth and breadth of financial data along with excellent integration with Excel is simply unmatched!
I actually looked into alternatives a couple of times and each time didn't find anything even close! There're a lot of rivals though including Factset that have great products but nothing really comes close to Bloomberg especially if you have to work with FI instruments.
Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
221–230 of 232 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, look at the Thai Baht exchange rate: http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/THB=X/?p=THB=X You see the graph on the right, it hovers around 30 USD/THB (that's 30 THB per USD, in somewhat confusing FX convention). Now click on 5Y, then click on 10Y, and compare. The 10Y graphs probably includes some wrong blip around 700, which is why the 10Y graph scale is from 0 to 750, and you just see a basically flat line displayed a…
Thanks for the example. What you just did is one of the hardest things to communicate about data. A casual user would never notice this. I find "data curation" doesn't always get the importance it deserves.
Oh, man, tell me about it!
To get from raw data to data you can use can be a hard, tedious and difficult slog. I agree that it's often undervalued. On the other hand, with Bloomberg you certainly pay for it! :-)
And don't get me started with corporate actions (stock splits, mergers), dividends (some jurisdictions announce gross divs, Australia announces net divs; Korea announces AFTER the ex-date; some shares pay a dividend in a ccy different from the ccy the shares are denominated in, etc.), unscheduled exchange closures (due to terrorism, typhoons, etc.), stamp duty and taxes, 1 week holidays for Chinese New Year that screw up the rate curve (because 1d and 1w LIBOR cover the same period), quanto futures, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is hyperbole, I've worked on dev side in finance a while now and bloomberg data is often unreliable, everywhere I've worked people have built layers on top of it, checking vs other sources and fat fingers. Also I'm actually currently working for some oil guys and they use bloomberg for some things but use specialist providers for oil macro, shipping and refinery events. I'd say their main advantages are familiar…
> This is hyperbole What I love about HN. I read one thing that sounds great and authoritative in a subject that I know nothing about. Just to have someone else rain on the parade! Which point of view is correct? I don't know (so I upvoted both..)
Hacker News is the ultimate waste of time. Correction: Hacker News _comments are the ultimate waste of time.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is hyperbole, I've worked on dev side in finance a while now and bloomberg data is often unreliable, everywhere I've worked people have built layers on top of it, checking vs other sources and fat fingers. Also I'm actually currently working for some oil guys and they use bloomberg for some things but use specialist providers for oil macro, shipping and refinery events. I'd say their main advantages are familiar…
I would argue they have established a sort of universal minimum threshold of information within the financial industry, across a ton of financial markets. This provides a certain amount of certainty/consistency within markets(really any sort of pseudo monopoly in a knowledge space does). Particularly in the news space, it sort of lets people assess to what degree they might have a competitive advantage by the degree…
It seems they must be getting the data through agreement with the companies they're collecting the data on. I wonder where the line is drawn between what they're doing and commercialised insider trading.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#225It's fast in terms of time takes from press release to screen, total news coverage is unrivaled (Reuters you could say maybe), forgot how many trillions of dollars they control all together. bonds they are the king, tradebook, their international financial data is a little rough, and their sales force is relentless. Try to sell me a god damn terminal every time. also they were ahead of pack regarding supply chain dat…
Scraping press releases, collecting news from various media outlets, monitoring socialmedia and then pushing all this info to a web/desktop app in real time seams rather trivial...? Wheres the secret sauce?
first to market?
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are lots of things on bloomblerg that cannot be found at google or yahoo... To name only a few: intraday market data, company filings, detailed/processed financial information (product/geographic segmentation, non-gaap metrics), transcripts of earnings calls, sell-side estimates, corporate actions (M&A, IPOs/secondary offerings), information about management, customers, suppliers, institutional shareholders...
Bloomberg only keeps its intraday data for 50 days. Google does have intraday data, but you need to know how to get it via the right http call. https://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NYSE%3AXOM&ei=X2uzWInZGYa... There's the board of Exxon Mobil, along with links to analyst estimates, company filings, related firms, calendar of their calls, transcripts, list of institutional shareholders, and so on. Most of the things you…
> Bloomberg only keeps its intraday data for 50 days
Just for the record, I'm looking at intraday data from a few years ago right now so that cannot be right.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not sold, so not comparable to BB.
Evil mode: That's not sold No, given freely away for "protection". Evil mode off: I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.
This is why I've started using the phrase "intelligence-entertainment complex".
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#228You've had lots of answers but I have a few other points that are worthy to mention...
The #1 key / function on a Bloomberg terminal is the Message key. Just like people are on Facebook because other people are on FB and not MySpace is the driver behind BB's message function. Bloomberg messages are key for relationship maintenance and informal (or even semi-formal) information exchange.
BB is a little hard to learn how to use because of all the special keys and function short codes. But because of those special keys and functions, once you are trained, the system is blazing fast to operate. Blazing fast in a trading environment is especially important to grumpy trading staff.
Which gets us to deal capture... so with the BB messaging system being so popular and in the early days being used to talk about deals, Bloomberg created a deal capture element to the system. So in addition to chatting with your street counterpart, you could formally confirm the deal you just messaged with your buddy. So take the social, add the deal capture, and add the fast & reliable, you have a damn good vanilla dealing system with zero overhead beyond monthly terminal cost, which you are paying anyway.
Unlike Reuters market data client-side infrastructure, BB terminal implementation requires low technical knowledge. Leased line and a black box communications server and bango you are up and running. Reuters, you need multiple Unix servers, so you need a Unix admin plus 1 more guy in case Unix admin #1 goes on holiday, plus leased lines, plus the comms equipment, plus this and plus that.
My old firm had 1 employee dedicated to untangling Reuters bills as there were user costs, systems as data user costs, depreciation costs, real time data costs, blah blah blah. Reuters billing had elements of self-auditing and internal real time data subscription management. BB bills are a list of BB terminal IDs which are easily mapped to user X and department Y. BB real time data feed costs are tied to specific user. You could process a Bloomberg invoice in 30 minutes with a temp staff.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#229It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades. Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And…
A great relative comparison as far as the keyboard goes is something like vi/vim or even QWERTY. I'm sure you could have better text editing shortcuts (power Sublime/Atom users maybe), or a better keyboard (Dvorak for example), but once people do things a certain way and develop proficiency, it's often tough to change.
This makes no sense. Vi emulators get into all kinds of text editors and IDEs for a reason, not the other way round. I haven't used a Dvorak keyboard so I don't know anything about that (though many sources seem to suggest its effect is debatable), but on Vi/Vim your comment couldn't be more wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example? Not that I don't believe you.
Ok, look at the Thai Baht exchange rate: http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/THB=X/?p=THB=X You see the graph on the right, it hovers around 30 USD/THB (that's 30 THB per USD, in somewhat confusing FX convention). Now click on 5Y, then click on 10Y, and compare. The 10Y graphs probably includes some wrong blip around 700, which is why the 10Y graph scale is from 0 to 750, and you just see a basically flat line displayed a…
Yes, data cleanup and maintenance is why proprietary data vendors still survive.