It's like Emacs or VIM for financial market professionals.
Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
81–90 of 232 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#82I think most of your questions can be answered by realizing that Bloomberg was founded in 1981, and they basically got a monopoly in financial data provision because there were no other options in 1981 . That is why they have a custom monitor & keyboard: in the days before the IBM PC, everyone had a custom monitor & keyboard, because these things were not standardized. Bloomberg was a technologist & businessman befor…
And it's not just a UI on some public data - Bloomberg also does some hard core networking behind those screens, up to installing a decent amount of dark fiber into various exchanges around the world to ensure low latency connections between data sources and consumers.
Dark fiber means unused. How does that help?
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#83Bloomberg has a massive network effect which makes it difficult to displace. Particularly when you move away from exchange traded products like equities and into areas like corporate fixed income, interactions are still conducted via bilateral discussion (i.e., online chat and text price dissemination). To be in the game you need to be where everyone else is talking. There is an ecosystem of price scraping and trade processing in Bloomberg which facilitates the whole trade and portfolio management process. I can route orders via Bloomberg to any broker and monitor execution of my orders in real-time. No the costs are not cheap but it is a lot cheaper than hiring several members of an operations team which would be necessary if this was all done manually.
Bloomberg is also like an operating system. For example, there are electronic execution venues in many types of instruments which use the Bloomberg as their front-end. This is very valuable. When you are a trader, screen real estate is critical. You can have 6 30" monitors and it still isn't enough if your tools are fragmented across 50 platforms. The more you can keep things integrated into a few core tools the better.
You are also paying a ton for ultra-responsive service. When millions or billions are on the line you don't have time to mess around on a help-line. On a Bloomberg you have 24-7 ultra-responsive skilled help who are responsive in around 30 seconds.
There are other reasons but end of the day if you are a pro then 30k/year isn't cheap but its a lot cheaper than trying to hack around with amateur tools.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like MSN Messenger or AOL, except that the identities of people on it are guaranteed, and things said on it are effectively contracts. Reuters operate a similar system. There are others too but no-one uses them.
Can you expand? Are identities checked and referenced, or enforced socially like on LinkedIn? When you say things are effectively contracts, I've heard about the very solid principles that some finance people work to - "if we said it then we will stand by it" sort of things - or does Bloomberg step in to arbitrate, or are chats accessible by the employing companies, how are contracts enforced?
Biometricaly secured also. The Bloomberg terminal requires a finger print to log into it. Also its a $20k a year subscription, so you can be pretty certain the people you are talking to are important and who they say they are.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#85Interesting read on Bloomberg vs Symphony (through an EU policy lens, but has a lot of details about BBG business model I hadn't read elsewhere) http://www.politico.eu/article/bloomberg-vs-the-banks/
I worked on Thomson Reuters Messenger, which Symphony tried hiring ex-Thomson people to work on. Symphony is a joke and will never gain any traction in any market. Bloomberg is the king, and if you don't have money you use Reuters. Otherwise your probably not very high end on finance.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#86Another point - Bloomberg by an large doesn't fail. This isn't some consumer "build fast, break things, and iterate" model. I can remember one time in my two decades using Bloomberg that something broke. For half a day this year the IB chat system went down. The world of finance practically ground to a halt. But that was the wild exception. Compared to most platforms Bloomberg may be a bit archaic but it is rock solid and thats way more important when you have billions on the line in realtime.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#87I used the Bloomberg terminal until 2010 so things might have changed since then. The breadth of the data is unrivaled as far as I know, enough examples have been given in the comments. Concerning the data quality I do have to object though, in my area of expertise (mutual funds at the time) Bloomberg data was far from perfect and there were better quality data sources available. I dont doubt that they deliver reliab…
> I think they should re-build the whole thing as a browser based application
Hopefully they understand that it would be a terrible idea. The current interface is orders magnitude more usable and responsive than a web interface could be. Despite the "terminal" look-and-feel it's constantly evolving and many parts are quite modern.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#88* Bloomberg Chat * It is a well accepted reference. You will often see a screenshot of a bloomberg terminal as "proof" of something
Confirmed. Worked on Thomson Reuters chat, which is FREE for anyone with an email address at a bank or financial institution, and we could not crack the hold that IB(Instant Bloomberg) had.
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#89Is it possible to access the bloomberg terminal chat via some sort of api?
Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is a powerful moat. Vi users or Emacs users may die out at one point in time but they are unlikely to switch in larger numbers.
It is worth noting that while the terminal (for layout see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal) is a moat there are other reasons it is hard to attack them (Fortune: "Can the Bloomberg terminal be toppled" http://fortune.com/2014/03/20/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-... .
While a moat makes it hard to attack it is not always the case that a moat is worth attacking. Just because the target seems weak makes it not valuable. Bloomberg is a private company so numbers are hard to get. What is obvious is that financial services consolidation, the movement to index investment and automated trading makes terminals not a growth market.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/business/dealbook/the-blo... > All service providers for Wall Street, not just Bloomberg, are unusually vulnerable at the moment. The financial industry is in the middle of an aggressive run of cost-cutting as it grapples with new regulations and changes in the markets. A Bloomberg contract, which can be upward of $100 million at larger institutions, is a tempting target to whittle down.
> The number of Bloomberg terminals grew only 1.9 percent, to 325,000, last year. In the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of terminals grew at an average rate of 12 percent each year, with most companies signing on for multiyear contracts.
There may be some demand for cheaper terminals but whether this amounts to enough to build out the expensive data collection organization is far from clear. As may have pointed out quality matters. Opportunities may become larger iff Bloomberg has to cut cost and quality decreases.