Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 232 posts

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

#211

Post by venning »

willstrafach wrote: post #196
venning wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SIPRNet is probably an order of magnitude larger with over four million users [1]. Even more impressive considering it isn't connected to the Internet. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet

Minor correction: it technically is connected to NIPR ("the internet") via cross-domain guards. Most information would go one-way, low to high, but very specific applications do warrant information going from Secret to unclassified in a very controlled manner, especially when it is time sensitive. It is actually an incredibly interesting topic, but it is hard to get much information on the specifics online (I assume…

The only times I've seen high-to-low transfer was through physical media, primarily optical disc. I wasn't aware that there was any wire between them.

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

#212

Post by kgwgk »

lordnacho wrote: post #197
kgwgk wrote: post #188

Earlier 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…

I don't know how to get the intraday data from Google, do you also get 50 days, quotes, trades, volumes traded...? There is some useful info in the reuters.com page linked from google. But still there are so many things that are not there. There is only very basic financial info, and I don't think you get it in google finance within minutes of it being published. Of course you could read the press release for free. And read every filing from the company yourself, and every filing from any related company, and from any asset manager who might have a relevant disclosure. And then you you can process all that data to put it in a comparable format. All for free!

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

#213

Post by gaius »

dirtbox wrote: post #209
gaius wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exploited in what way?

Entered the network, manipulated data, created misinformation, use social engineering tricks and tried to control stock pricing. When you have a platform only accessible to the elite, it makes the possibilities extremely tempting.

You would have more luck impersonating voices on the phone!

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

#214

Post by JBReefer »

nickpeterson wrote: post #176
JBReefer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Well, except vscode is behind vs for F#. Try using a type provider on vscode, it runs like crap for anything non trivial.

Oh, maybe something like Js then? I just pulled the first language I thought of!

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

#215

Post by zhte415 »

zimablue wrote: post #106
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…

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…

You're correct data can sometimes be wrong, but this is mainly in the basic datasets provided, and still exceptionally rare. I once highlight a figure was wrong to their helpdesk, in an obscure money supply aggregate, bt public data that I happened to be pretty intimate with, and their helpdesk were all over a solution in seconds.

For added-cost datasets, they're mainly a reseller for a 3rd party data provider and SLAs need to be checked to see what you're getting.

For checking via other sources, this is a minimum in finance. Reconciliation / validation needs to be done at every step something new is introduced, and just for the heck of it usually anyway.

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

#216

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dustinkirkland wrote: post #31

Try: $ apt install wallstreet $ wallstreet I created that for Ubuntu, as a follow-on to: $ apt install hollywood $ hollywood Purely for fun. Try it!

http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/wallstreet

"fill your console with Wall Street-like news and stats"

[Tried to "apt show" it, I'm not on zesty.]

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

#217

Post by zhte415 »

lefstathiou wrote: post #114

I think Bloomberg is a lot weaker than people realize (in terms of competitive position). It offers a lot of functionality as many threads have pointed out but at any given time, the marginal user utilizes 0.5% of what it does. I sat in fixed income origination for years and the only reason I used it was to find some obscure pricing details which are now available for free elsewhere and to quickly export interest rat…

> It offers a lot of functionality as many threads have pointed out but at any given time, the marginal user utilizes 0.5% of what it does.

Excel also shows these monopoly effects. And there's always a plugin or alternate option for power users to do their thing.

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

#218

Post by zhte415 »

mrkgnao wrote: post #45
princeb wrote: post #20

it's everything: - news articles - squawk - economic data releases - historical and live market data - asset pricing - charts and analytics - click trading - trade execution and transaction cost analysis - trade order management and post trade processing - portfolio and risk management - alerts - chat - mail - Excel integration - amazing stuff like DINE , FLY , and POSH (lol) there's probably a ton more stuff that i…

> DINE , FLY , and POSH Can you ... can you order takeout from a Bloomberg terminal?

>Can you ... can you order takeout from a Bloomberg terminal?

Almost. You can ask the helpdesk, and get decent answers along the lines of a telephone number for a restaurant but not 'this place is recommended'

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

#219

Post by eru »

jan888 wrote: post #146
eru wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've used vim for years with Dvorak and no remapping. Works great, IMO.

Oh, I'm using it that way, too. (Just don't tell anyone I'm not using hjkl for navigating; my Kinesis Advantage keyboard has cursor keys in sensible locations.)

But there's at least one attempt at a nice remapping for dvorak.

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

#220

Post by brw12 »

Basically, there isn't just "news" as in stories -- there's tons of data that's annoying, hard or impossible to find without paying various parties for it and scraping it, which Bloomberg makes available in one place, sorted and sortable and searchable, and possible to import automatically into Excel. Eg., it's the most reliable source of dates, times, and data content for upcoming and past macroeconomic announcements and earnings announcements; you can fetch stock index components with their current weights in the basket; and you can graph all sorts of things against each other using their powerful graphing software.
Post reply on HN