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Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

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Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#121

Post by _IsThisRealLife »

manish_gill wrote: post #51
hazard wrote: post #11

It 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…

Related question: What makes all this information hard to find and how do they do it? I wonder if there can be an alternative interface which will collate all this information? Like OP, I've also been curious about the Bloomberg Terminal and all the information that one supposedly has access to when using it. If nothing else, just to satisfy my curiosity, I'd love to poke around on such a system once.

As others have mentioned there is a large amount of expert knowledge to collecting and organizing extremely disparate data sets. There are also longstanding business relationships, lots across a lot of markets, and a reputation for great data security, that has many pricing sources and exchanges offering data almost exclusively through the terminal, and some folks putting their own data into the system. The risk with mishandling(making unavailable or available at unreliable/inconsistent times, for example) some of that data is just so high that 30+ years of reputation in some spaces is worth a (maybe perceived) premium.

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#122

Post by raldi »

trelliscoded wrote: post #23
hazard wrote: post #11

It 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…

How do I answer questions about oil tanker availability? I don't see anything in the manual about that. I guess it might be under BMAP or BI, but nothing obvious stands out to me...

Press

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#123

Post by hashkb »

heisenbit wrote: post #22
urs2102 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

We keep creating more vimpires every day. We will outlive GUI editor users by centuries.

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#124

Post by bboreham »

manish_gill wrote: post #51
hazard wrote: post #11

It 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…

Related question: What makes all this information hard to find and how do they do it? I wonder if there can be an alternative interface which will collate all this information? Like OP, I've also been curious about the Bloomberg Terminal and all the information that one supposedly has access to when using it. If nothing else, just to satisfy my curiosity, I'd love to poke around on such a system once.

Some of it is fed in directly by the providers. For example Barclays and JPMorgan interest rate swap rates.

There is a network effect: all the customers the dealers want to reach are on Bloomberg, so they have to publish on Bloomberg. If someone else comes along and says "publish on my channel too", that's extra work, so probably won't get done.

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#125

Post by raldi »

arx1422 wrote: post #86

Another 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 soli…

What's amazing about this is that (at least as of the time when I worked there, 2003-2007) they've always broken just about every rule about coding style, DRY, unit tests, and so on ("We're not writing textbooks here") and yet (or because of this) were by a wide margin the highest-velocity shipper-of features I've ever known.

And this was all done while meeting the highest standards of performance and reliability. How'd they do it? I'd say two things: heavy investment in human testers, and an amazingly-rich "immune system": Deploy a bug in your new version of a Bloomberg function? Last week's code is still running alongside it, and in seconds you can route that one function over to the old instance while keeping all the other terminal functions on the new version. And an automated system might do it for you before you even get paged.

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#126

Post by anonu »

- the custom keyboard may have been a holdover from the early versions of Bloomberg, today its not as useful. I personally think the key response on it is terrible. So I actually just keep it plugged in for the fingerprint scanner.

- bbg is about quick access to data. Most of the data is publicly available. But if you serve it up super quick and consistently, people value that

- the chat application is what the vast majority of people pay for, IMHO. This gives you access to most other people in your industry or product group. This is how business is conducted. - bbg has an army of people backing their product.. from the bbg help to data cleaners. This ensures quality for the high price you're paying

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#127

Post by bboreham »

anjc wrote: post #110

It seems as if there's a lot of behind the scenes data aggregation and analytics, which is good. But surely somebody has created a cheap variation on the rest of it? I.e. software with keystrokes to quickly access open financial data? I mean there's nothing to stop someone doing that, getting custom keyboards made, and selling it for a tiny fraction of the price right? I'd imagine that there are quite a lot of people…

The data is what's valuable. You can't get up-to-date data for free, and if you can then you can't re-publish it.

Re: Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

#130

Post by mathattack »

The most important thing is it's ubiquitous in Finance. If everyone has it, it's very hard for someone else to introduce a competitor that others don't have.

It's also got an interface that everyone is used to. Not a great interface, but one that everyone knows.

There are cheaper alternatives, as well as easier to use alternatives, and alternatives with better analytics. But in general they just layer above BBG, they don't replace it.

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