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

71–80 of 232 posts

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

#71

Post by FabHK »

throwawayish wrote: post #63
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…

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.

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

#72

Post by FabHK »

PeterisP wrote: post #65
manish_gill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#74

Post by return0 »

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.

That's facebook's job

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

#75

Post by walterbell »

brainrain wrote: post #62

Interesting 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/

From the article, on encryption key management to satisfy US regulators:

> Banks under the agency’s jurisdiction that use Symphony also agreed to store message with the messaging company for seven years and to keep duplicate copies of their decryption keys with independent custodians of their choosing.

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

#76

Post by Qwertious »

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.

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.

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

#77

Post by mistermumble »

dirtyaura wrote: post #68
rl3 wrote: post #29

315,000 subscribers paying north of $20,000 per year, as of 2013.[0] Whoa. [0] https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c...

It's interesting to think about from a different angle: Paul Graham once wrote that "information wants to be free", and that there are very few areas in which you can make a significant revenue by selling information, financial information being the exception. $6B ($9b) seems to be the upper bound of revenue for an information product (company). And Bloomberg has unusually wide moat.

Minor correction: it was Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) who said "Information wants to be free". Paul Graham may have quoted it -- along with a multitude of others, since it was first uttered in 1984.

Actually turns out the original quote attributed to Brand is not quite right. There is a qualifier ("Information almost wants to be free"), but that qualifier dropped off along the way.

See http://www.digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be...

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

#79

Post by ptaipale »

Qwertious wrote: post #76
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.

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.

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

#80

Post by sparkling »

ry4n413 wrote: post #9

It's fast in terms of time takes from press release to screen, total news coverage is unrivaled (Reuters you could say maybe), forgot how many trillions of dollars they control all together. bonds they are the king, tradebook, their international financial data is a little rough, and their sales force is relentless. Try to sell me a god damn terminal every time. also they were ahead of pack regarding supply chain dat…

Scraping press releases, collecting news from various media outlets, monitoring socialmedia and then pushing all this info to a web/desktop app in real time seams rather trivial...? Wheres the secret sauce?
Post reply on HN