141–150 of 232 posts
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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.
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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.
An alternative to Bloomberg Terminal, on the research side, is Tiingo, an amazing financial data portal. They ask that if you use it, you pay a minimum of $7 per month, though that is not currently enforced.
Thanks for the mention! The goal is to help liberate financial data and make it accessible to everyone via tools and education. I've already gone where bloomberg doesn't, like a custom metrics creator for the screener, and the podcast is top-rated. Either way, I work my butt off because I want everybody to have access to the same tools I did.
Thank you for mentioning the platform :) let me know if you have any questions! https://www.tiingo.com
I work with municipal bonds - long story short, the muni market is a fixed income market with several legal and structural characteristics which add complexity over the corporate and government bond markets.
For example - generally municipal bonds are structured with serial maturities and a 10 year par call option, which means issuers are constantly refinancing, paying bonds down with cash, etc. This introduces complexity around even knowing what bonds an issuer still has outstanding. To someone who works with corporates, you'd just pull up the ticker and immediately see what's there - for our market, it takes a lot of manual effort to track the bonds, digitize old documents, and present that information in a logical interface.
(Similar to the SEC's EDGAR, there is an information repository for the municipal market called EMMA, which was introduced post-crisis - so it is fairly easy to pull recent disclosures, but very difficult to track older bonds/documents.)
On the investment banking side, we have one Bloomberg terminal for our entire floor, since the subscription is fairly expensive and we don't have as much need for the info as the traders do. If a company were to simply track information about municipal bonds, starting with the largest issuers, they could undercut Bloomberg in this market and make a good chunk of subscription revenue.
I have to imagine these opportunities exist elsewhere as well. I doubt that there are many folks who use BBG functions for more than the handful of markets in which they participate. I bet that there are markets where smaller companies could do just as good a job as BBG at gathering information for a lower cost.
A thought I just had while typing this comment - to me, BBG seems analogous to a cable TV bundle, where you pay for a ton of channels that you don't use. I wonder if competing against BBG in single markets would motivate them to introduce tiered/a la carte subscription models? The one feature keeping everyone on Bloomberg is chat (and to a certain extent, the actual trading platform) - in my case, if we could have that while only subscribing to a few functions, that would probably be enough for us and could save on subscription costs.
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The main part is not purely interface but the aggregation of data - integration with thousands of various systems, licencing agreements with thousands of proprietary data sources, automated and manual data cleanup. This isn't scalable and simply requires thousands of people and lots of work, because obtaining ocean tanker data doesn't really help you get integration for e.g. Nigerian mining industry data.
Also, error scrubbing. There's lots of financial data available on yahoo, for example, but it's just lousy quality.
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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.
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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.
I 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…
Current technology is awful for professional use.