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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?

#131

Post by gaius »

kanwisher wrote: post #88
tezza wrote: post #5

* 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.

I also worked for Reuters tho' not on chat and for many of us it was very obvious why we kept losing to Bloomberg. Reuters would send its sales people into a bank's IT department and say things like "our product uses standard TCP/IP networking!". Bloomberg would go into the front office and say "here are some ways you can make more money!".

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

#132

Post by charles-salvia »

The best way to think about the Bloomberg terminal is a web browser that connects you to a private network. (Bloomberg actually is the largest known private network.) Once connected, you have access to thousands of "web apps" - which Bloomberg users call "functions". Instead of a URL, you use a short 2 to 5 letter mnemonic code for each function, such as "MSG" for email, or "TOP" for top news. These different functions provide all sorts of various functionality - most of them are of course related to financial information. Functions like "CDSW" are for analyzing credit default swaps, "SDLC" gives you supply chain data for different companies, other functions analyze or curate Twitter, others correlate news events with historical stock data, etc. There are also many non-financial functions as well that reflect the "social network" aspect of the Bloomberg terminal, such as "POSH" which is basically a high-end Craigs list, or "DINE" which is a high-end Yelp.

All-in-all, the Bloomberg Terminal is like a private Internet for financial professionals.

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

#133

Post by HoyaSaxa »

It is pretty simple: network effects.

Nearly every trader, sales person, and investment manager in finance has a bloomberg terminal which is guaranteed to own a lot of screen real estate on their monitors. If you need to get in touch with someone as quickly and efficiently as possible, bloomberg chat is the way to go. You are usually involved in multiple conversations at once so phones just don't cut it.

I traded two different products that were almost exclusively traded via IB (chat) or MSG (email like). There is nothing special about either of those communication channels, but market norms are incredibly powerful.

As others are mentioning, Bloomberg also centralizes a ton of different data, but this much easier to replicate than the network effects of the products above.

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

#134

Post by blincoln »

FabHK wrote: post #71
throwawayish wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. I'm European and I always wondered why in practically every American criminal-spy-scifi-investigative-themed TV show or movie there are people sitting at magical, proprietary computers able to find strange pieces of (personal) information in no time (but obviously always complex to use, because other characters don't know how). I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sen…

Bloomberg delivers financial information, not information on every individual.

Lexis-Nexis is probably the equivalent for individuals.

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

#136

Post by skykooler »

ptaipale wrote: post #79
Qwertious wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim is an amazingly good concept , but the actual implementations completely lack a decent user experience. Like, when you do clearly-suboptimal key combinations (like going past a 4-line paragraph by hitting j 4 times instead of just pressing } once),there should be some side-window suggesting better practices. To be fair, Kakoune does that, but there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit like that.

This particular example makes assumptions: that hitting j four times is worse than entering } once. This depends on typist and keyboard; I use Swedish/Finnish keyboard and touch-type, and hitting j four times happens without looking or thinking. Hitting } requires me to lift my right hand from typing position, hold Alt-Gr, press 0, and then go back to typing position.

Does Vim not have alternate mappings for other keyboard layouts?

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

#137

Post by return0 »

cm2012 wrote: post #97
return0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's facebook's job

I know it's a joke, but as a high spend Facebook advertiser, I can tell you that Facebook only sells audience information in aggregate, not on an individual basis.

They could use their ai to match you with advertised products. You wouldnt need individual data in this case.

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

#138

Post by rishifromtiingo »

barnabee wrote: post #52
nodesocket wrote: post #46

UCF has a great tutorial video on the Bloomberg terminal. It is an hour and 7 minutes long, but watch it and you will see why it's the standard in finance. The data/news feed is great and UX is optimized for speed, dense display of information, and filtering. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE

> UX is optimized for speed, dense display of information, and filtering I often wish more software would make the same UX trade-offs. I suspect this is why a lot of advanced users stick with the command line - a better "pro" UX is surely possible (REPLs / notebook style interfaces are a limited example) but outside of programming tools there doesn't seem to be much serious effort in this space.

Yes, I 100% agree. I struggle with this decision constantly on my platform (https://www.tiingo.com). People have called it a "Bloomberg Killer" but I strongly disagree. My goal is not to replace bloomberg.

But one thing I constantly iterated was getting that blend. I also found though, some users didn't use some of the features like keyboard shortcuts. Also the way iterative web design works, is it kind of runs counter to developing keyboard shortcuts. You want to develop quickly, but at the same time keyboard shortcuts need to stay the same alongside a fast UX. If you constantly change things when people prioritize predictability and speed, you run into what Excel did in 2007 when everything changed.

It's a tradeoff and I think there has to be some semblance of stability before you can optimize the UX. I think I'm now at that stage but the current paradigms of iterative development make this difficult to pull off in the short-term.

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

#139

Post by eru »

skykooler wrote: post #136
ptaipale wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular example makes assumptions: that hitting j four times is worse than entering } once. This depends on typist and keyboard; I use Swedish/Finnish keyboard and touch-type, and hitting j four times happens without looking or thinking. Hitting } requires me to lift my right hand from typing position, hold Alt-Gr, press 0, and then go back to typing position.

Does Vim not have alternate mappings for other keyboard layouts?

There's at least one remapping to make it dvorak friendly.

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

#140

Post by JBReefer »

kkkrist wrote: post #40
heisenbit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have gone from Textmate to Sublime to Atom and finally took the time to properly learn vi. vi has made my typing so vastly more efficient that I can't imagine to ever use anything else again. I guess you have never really used vi to make such a comparison, same as op has probably never used the Bloomberg Terminal.

Do you feel that way about generic text or code in particular? I haven't seen Intellisense or project templating for, say, F# at the same level as a VS Code.

Does this exist? I'd love to move more to Vim!

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