Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don't mean relatively basic info like "What's the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?" or "What's the current CDS spread for Citibank?" that you can easily google for but also stuff like "Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?" and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.

Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).

Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.

What I love about HN. I read one thing that sounds great and authoritative in a subject that I know nothing about. Just to have someone else rain on the parade! Which point of view is correct? I don't know (so I upvoted both..)

"sounds" being the operative word. Lots of ... lets say 'articulate' people on HN, in general. Current thread excepted.

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.

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.

While a moat makes it hard to attack it is not always the case that a moat is worth attacking. Just because the target seems weak makes it not valuable. Bloomberg is a private company so numbers are hard to get. What is obvious is that financial services consolidation, the movement to index investment and automated trading makes terminals not a growth market.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/business/dealbook/the-blo... > All service providers for Wall Street, not just Bloomberg, are unusually vulnerable at the moment. The financial industry is in the middle of an aggressive run of cost-cutting as it grapples with new regulations and changes in the markets. A Bloomberg contract, which can be upward of $100 million at larger institutions, is a tempting target to whittle down.

> The number of Bloomberg terminals grew only 1.9 percent, to 325,000, last year. In the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of terminals grew at an average rate of 12 percent each year, with most companies signing on for multiyear contracts.

There may be some demand for cheaper terminals but whether this amounts to enough to build out the expensive data collection organization is far from clear. As may have pointed out quality matters. Opportunities may become larger iff Bloomberg has to cut cost and quality decreases.

I guess you have never really used vi to make such a comparison, same as op has probably never used the Bloomberg Terminal.

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

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.

And yes, typing [\]{|} and so on is inconvenient on my keyboard. I particularly detest the choice of \ over / in MSDOS and Windows path names.

I occasionally use US keyboard layout just to get around these difficulties, but whenever I arrive at some random computer, it will have the local layout.

(This is particularly confusing when going to France or Germany with they AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.)

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

I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sense where that idea comes from.

Why does 'tac' mean "reverse abcd to dcba, line-by-line, on the input stream? Human brevity and wit. and then look at the Bloomberg Terminal and ask "Why does 'OTFN'* mean "empty oil tanks departing ports with a cost modifier proportional to the time left in port and risk of loading delays vs. departure cutoffs?", it's for the same human reasons: someone wanted to type as few letters as possible to get something done, and came up with something that seemed good at the time, and it stuck.

Hacking shows always show us people typing three commands and ending up at the [fictional agency of choice] here. Bloomberg can work magic beyond belief with three commands, and even more amazingly dedicated the HELP button on every keyboard to "press it repeatedly and HELP opens the chat to you", which is maybe the best approach I've ever seen.

* OTFN "Oil The Fuck Now" may or may not exist in Bloomberg Terminal, I sadly do not have access :(

That's not sold

No, given freely away for "protection".

Evil mode off:

I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.

A web search for "24/7 ask-a-librarian" returns a page full of different libraries that always, without end, offer a human being ready to try and help you consult through the world of knowledge. If you're polite, they'll do their best to help.

It's not like Bloomberg, where you can just interrupt your work by hitting HELP and magically get a solution provided. But it is a little-known HELP button for information research.

SHIP Shipping functions menu

VSRC Vessel search

VSTK Vessel capacity data

FLET Aggregated fleet data

FIXS Research daily global tanker fixtures

BFX Baltic freight index

BMAP Generate energy-related maps

I disagree that the information is hard to find. I think a lot of the data is publicly available. Bloomberg "normalizes" it for you and makes it easy and quick to access. As you point out, they have depth and breadth. And that is where the value lies.

Many people have tried to compete with Bloomberg. Millions and millions of dollars have been poured into competitor products. In my opinion, you will never be able to replace Bloomberg. The key, however, is to break up the functionality. Build a better graphing tool, a better chat app, a better financial analysis tool, a data API that plugs into Excel, Python, C++, etc... etc...

Also, the value offering of bbg goes beyond the terminal. For example, Bloomberg sells a lot of their "static" data in daily or hourly file updates (for $100Ks/year). They are the central hub for RFQs and IOIs. They also pour money into machine learning techniques to provide better/faster news. They sell their news firehose for top dollar and people will pay for it.

If you're wondering why the original documents are not more directly machine readable, consider that some of them are published by companies due to regulatory obligations, and those companies would much prefer not to publish the information at all. So making the documents easier to consume is where Bloomberg comes in--because the originators don't want to.

There's lots of financial data available on yahoo, for example, but it's just lousy quality.

http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/THB=X/?p=THB=X

You see the graph on the right, it hovers around 30 USD/THB (that's 30 THB per USD, in somewhat confusing FX convention).

Now click on 5Y, then click on 10Y, and compare. The 10Y graphs probably includes some wrong blip around 700, which is why the 10Y graph scale is from 0 to 750, and you just see a basically flat line displayed at the bottom.

(The 10Y PHP graph is fine, while the 10Y INR graph has a similar issue).

So, if you do any trading strategy where you're trying to figure out whether your current value is relatively high or low by comparing it to the 10Y max and min, you'll most likely be off.

Or consider equity, for example. To properly deal with shares, you first need the trading calendar for every exchange (when is the exchange open and you can make a trade), and the settlement calendar (when will the shares actually be settled). US settlement is typically T+3, Europe T+2, UK Gilts T+1, but all according to certain calendars, naturally. These calendars vary by country, and even exchange and even function (in other words, there might be days when shares at a certain exchange trade, but don't settle, and vice versa).

Bloomberg has all these details - good luck finding it on Yahoo or anywhere else, really.

To get from raw data to data you can use can be a hard, tedious and difficult slog. I agree that it's often undervalued. On the other hand, with Bloomberg you certainly pay for it! :-)

And don't get me started with corporate actions (stock splits, mergers), dividends (some jurisdictions announce gross divs, Australia announces net divs; Korea announces AFTER the ex-date; some shares pay a dividend in a ccy different from the ccy the shares are denominated in, etc.), unscheduled exchange closures (due to terrorism, typhoons, etc.), stamp duty and taxes, 1 week holidays for Chinese New Year that screw up the rate curve (because 1d and 1w LIBOR cover the same period), quanto futures, etc.

2.5 hours in the morning (10:00 to 12:30), 1.5 hours in the afternoon (14:30 to 16:00), who needs more than 4 hours trading a day?

Shame they extended it in 2011.

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.

The reason they're still a monopoly is because knowing how to navigate a Bloomberg is a critical skill for most finance professionals, and now that they have that skillset, they can be very productive moving around in it. A different (better?) UI would require they re-learn everything, which is not going to happen. And when financial professionals are making half a million a year, paying $24k/year for a terminal so that they can be productive isn't a bad investment.

(Source: have a couple friends at Bloomberg. One is in their UI department, and keeps having his proposals for better UIs shot down for business reasons. Also married a financial professional who had to use a Bloomberg in her days as a bond trader.)

> A dark fibre network or simply dark network is a privately operated optical fiber network that is run directly by its operator over dark fibre leased or purchased from another supplier. This is in contrast to purchasing bandwidth or leased line capacity on an existing network. Dark fibre networks may be used for private networking, or as Internet access or infrastructure.

You're right.

Way back when, only bond traders used Bloombergs. Equity and FX guys used other things (Quotron, Reuters, maybe?)

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

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet

Maybe it's mostly using satellite connections?

Seems like there'd be many times (particularly in the US) where tunneling an encrypted connection over a civilian ISP would be worlds better than the next best option. Maybe not even at the IP level, but a dedicated wavelength on some existing AT&T fibre, for example.

> Provide DISN-provided transport and information services used for > data, voice, video, and cross domain through a combination of terrestrial, > aerial, satellite assets, and services IAW DODD 5105.19 (reference c). > Transport services include information transfer services between CC/S/A > installations, facilities, and enclaves, for connections to external mission > partner and defense contractor ISs and networks, and wide area network > information transfer.

http://web.archive.org/web/20120914011329/http://www.dtic.mi...

It is actually an incredibly interesting topic, but it is hard to get much information on the specifics online (I assume many details are classified or at least SBU).

I could buy largest private financial network, but it's hard to verify a claim like this when the Chinese network behind the great firewall could be considered a private network (measuring by the intent rather than the implementation).

Another aspect is trust. If you are trading billions you want the information/trade data "currency" everyone else uses. I built backends converting MBS bid to yield and if it wasn't tuned to a 1/16 or better of Bloomberg, it wasn't usable.

Bloomberg also offers custom studies like "fear/greed" which may have some value.

TR/Thompson Reuters also has a competitive product for much less and you can't really go wrong with either for 99% of use cases.

There are also many stand alone news sources you could use. Benzinga comes to mind as one example.

Interesting note - Bloomberg is highly protective of their IP and has been know to write takedown notices of screenshots posted online.

// built 2 SaaS Fintech systems

I believe one of their great data advantages is access. Buy a terminal and you will now have access to niche email distribution lists that no website sees or crawls with important market data (like fixed income bwics).

I believe it is difficult to attack Bloomberg head on as others are trying (like money.net or Eikon) but relatively easy to build really rich ecosystems in niche places outside of Bloomberg. Have you heard of a company called Intex? Probably not. In the global structured products market they are a monopoly solution generating 100-200mm in top line with 100 employees and 3 sales people. Wildly profitable but try to start something like that without being in structured products for years and you're dead on arrival. No one will give you the data you need.

www.bamsec.com

ps this is not a personal plug. I do know the founder now but only after I discovered tool and reached out.

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

Mike Bloomberg started the company because while working at Merrill Lynch (in the 80ies) he thought the computer terminals banks used at the time to see stock and bond prices where ridiculous. He got funded by Merrill Lynch and disrupted the industry, overtaking rivals like Reuters (which well into the 90ies was usually considered the most trustworthy source for stock data)

You needed their special hardware only until the late nineties (the "Bloomberg box" - consider that up until around 96 or 97, only few employees would have internet access on their desktop, even inside "bulge bracket" investment banks): nowadays, you can get Blooomberg terminal on their workstation or on your own hardware. Likewise, you can run in on a dedicated connection, or on your normal internet line.

The key element of Bloomberg terminal is reliability: it feeds data you can usually trust and price feeds you can almost certainly trust. When you are checking prices changing several times a second across exchanges in different part of the world that's no easy feat). That's crucial when millions of dollars are at stake.

Second is the ability to access 80% of the data and information you would ever want to check wihout leaving the terminal.

Third ingredient is ease of use.

Fourth is incredible customer service.

Fifth is innovation: they continuously innovate, improve old features, add new features, introduce access to new data/information.

Once you remove the cost of the underlying live price feeds (from stock exchanges), The Bloomberg terminal is not that expensive for what it does. Bear in mind its customers are people that spend their day optimizing their financial decisions: if there was something cheaper working as well, they would go for it. If there was something working even better, they would go for it, probably even at a higher price point (because that's how the economics in the banking and investing world work).

Fun read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-blo...

Solly infamously demutualized, under John Gutfreund, and in that process, Bloomberg left, presumably with any IP waivers he needed (after all, they had to get partners to agree to be paid off, and that was a political battle) and from that position, it was I imagine, certainly easier, to attract Merril to invest in the new venture, as 50% partners.

Merill later sold i think all but a token stake, and Bloomberg was the majority buyer for their shares.

At no time did Michael Bloomberg work for Merill Lynch.

His timing, and trading, was impeccable.

Solly was long the 800lb gorilla of fixed income.

Coming from a former partner, the intimacy he had with the intriciacies of data (especially the archaic clearing systems he led to be automated, literally Solomon Brothers cared only for their front desks by habit, legendarily earning so much as to get away with a devil may care attitude long past when most firms would have been bust by conterparties declaring oprisk indigestible) he probably could have held a beauty parade for potential investors. Merril was probably chosen for two equally important characteristics, however: passivity as investors, and out size retail salesforce, immediate users for new equities data products Bloomberg wanted to launch.

Pretty sure they were long one of the largest Tandem customers, and may still rum Tandem for messaging. As noted in other comments, their messaging is nigh bullet proof. As is also noted in other comments, they give a real damn about latency, so make telcos (at least telco sales reps) weep no doubt more than most customers.

If there is a lesson for the startup world, i think it is this (besides way to trade to get his investment): there are apparently infinite messaging products, and a multiple thereof of features for messaging, but if you want to grow a high margin niche monopoly, or just a business period, build your messaging like civilization itself depends on it. How many hundreds of billions in capital have been made and lost in what are essentially messaging products? But name one that can count a few nines of reliability you'd entrust your capital, your family's emergencies, your daily banking, to, that is on the web?

- 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

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.

Excel integration was generally good, at the time I used the Terminal you had however to decide between two types of applications. The original Terminal which is linked to one PC, i.e. can only be accessed from one specific PC at work and not from home, or the 'Bloomberg anywhere' edition, which I believe was launched as some kind of remote application from a browser and could be used at any PC. The issue with the latter option was that it did not offer Excel integration.

I never liked the UI, some windows application with a lot of 'Terminal' baggage from the 1980's. I think they should re-build the whole thing as a browser based application, not replacing the old 'Terminal' application that current users are accustomed to but to on-board new users on a modern platform with a long term migration path to shut down the current application for good. Otherwise they might be replaced by a newcomer eventually...

https://www.money.net/ seems to be such a potential newcomer, especially considering the much more reasonable price point and the use of current technology.

Hopefully they understand that it would be a terrible idea. The current interface is orders magnitude more usable and responsive than a web interface could be. Despite the "terminal" look-and-feel it's constantly evolving and many parts are quite modern.

Current technology is awful for professional use.

[0] https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c...

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.

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...

I suppose at the end of the day even though they do all this I'm not 100% sure they do it very well. I don't use the terminal or claim to know how, but it seems to have have become an essential tool for many people in the finance industry.

Although after all that I know there is a joke going around that the main reason most people fork out for the terminal is for the chat functionality.

It's very hard to break out of that, because doing so means you're now excluded from some of the most useful and important information. Nobody wants to be first to leave, and convincing enough users to leave en masse to create or use an alternative seems impossible at this point.

According to https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see-when-t... , all Bloomberg employees could see when a user last logged in (like "w" in Unix), transcripts of all chats between the user and customer service (these chats are triggered by pressing F1/HELP twice, as other comments have indicated), and how many times the user used specific functions over the last 30 days.

"Potential users don’t want to get onboard unless all the other people in their ecosystem are on the service. That dynamic obviously keeps most people from joining Symphony. Most everyone working in financial markets is already on Bloomberg, and it would take virtually everyone leaving at the same time to give Symphony critical mass.

“I think Facebook is the best comparison,” Ayzerov says. “If Facebook had only one fourth of your friends, you wouldn’t use it. The advantage of Bloomberg is that every financial person has it.”"

See http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3572874/banking... for some of the obstacles that Symphony faces

Pulls up a global map with "near-realtime" locations of cargo ships, offshore oil derricks and wind farms, tropical depressions and hurricanes, uranium mines, all kinds of crazy stuff.

You can zoom in on the Panama Canal and see which oil tankers under whose flag are waiting in line to pass through, where they're going and how much oil they're carrying.

You can sort the world's ocean-going cargo vessels by commodity, to see where all the orange juice is."

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloo...

* It is a well accepted reference. You will often see a screenshot of a bloomberg terminal as "proof" of something

The financial world does not rely on iron-clad cryptographic security. It relies on a very well developed system of layers of trust.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo-idUSKCN1...

- 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<GO>, FLY<GO>, and POSH<GO> (lol)

there's probably a ton more stuff that i don't use and don't know. bloomberg is a mile wide and a mile deep in some areas.

you can get any of these features individually from plenty of service providers in the market. some are less specialized and cheaper and some are more specialized and more expensive. if you don't want to manage fifty different contracts with different service providers bloomberg provides a one-stop shop.

bloomberg is more than just data now. it wants to be absolutely everything that a financial firm needs - front office, middle office, back office.

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

"POSH, a Craigslist for the wealthy"

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloo...

Banking software also use this type of codes to reach different functions: post a cheque, take a draft, print an account statement, update customer record, loan balance/amortisation/payback history; in short, they do everything with short 3-4-5 letter keywords. This type of system has very high learning curve ("Hey Alex, what's the keyword for locker rent arrears list?"); but it is a joy to watch competent people operate the program to get things done.

Many business software also work this way (SAP ERP/Oracle Financials), but none of them are likely to be as fast as Bloomberg though. AutoCAD also has some commands like this (like Emacs'/Vim's ex/M-x prompt? ":"/"M-x"). I wish other consumer software also allowed access to screens/dialog boxes and functions in this direct manner without having to click menus and buttons a thousand times.

I doubt food delivery falls within their expertise or even scope of compliance, in the same way you still can't buy flight tickets from fly<go>, but if they want to do it, if they ever do, seamless has no choice but to take them seriously.

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'

Bloomberg is also like an operating system. For example, there are electronic execution venues in many types of instruments which use the Bloomberg as their front-end. This is very valuable. When you are a trader, screen real estate is critical. You can have 6 30" monitors and it still isn't enough if your tools are fragmented across 50 platforms. The more you can keep things integrated into a few core tools the better.

You are also paying a ton for ultra-responsive service. When millions or billions are on the line you don't have time to mess around on a help-line. On a Bloomberg you have 24-7 ultra-responsive skilled help who are responsive in around 30 seconds.

There are other reasons but end of the day if you are a pro then 30k/year isn't cheap but its a lot cheaper than trying to hack around with amateur tools.

True apart from the "skilled" part. They have cut-n-paste monkeys staffing 1st line help-help support and you know it.

Any question that actually involves thinking (bugs in their software or interesting questions about the API or details of their financial models) just gets passed through a game of telephones until you reach the actual competent people hours or days after you have devised a workaround for the burning issue yourself.

You can find some background here on what it does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE

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.

It's worth noting that this is the antithesis of mainstream designer thinking right now. Designers i've worked with want to minimise the amount of information on screen to maximise its impact and clarity; lots of blank space, lots of elegance. Perhaps this works for general consumer apps, but it's not what heavy professional users want, are accustomed to, or can make the best use of.

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.

The ability to trade is perhaps no so important these days given the advent of algo trading/stat arb, but it serves to emphasize the point that there is more to the terminal than just viewing the data.

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.

Their data is faster and cleaner than most of their competition. Personally, I find their interface clunky by today's standards, but it's entrenched in the industry, so there's a non-trivial learning "cost" for anyone considering switching away, and even if they're able to adapt to a new interface, they're likely to find holes in the available data. Beyond their data, they connect the financial industry over Bloomberg chat, so it's got the network effect there. The hardware itself is not a huge factor IMO. Plenty of people use Bloomberg terminals, via Bloomberg Anywhere, logging in from their standard desktop with their normal Windows keyboards.

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.

One if Mike Bloomberg himself. He is a rarity. He is a founder who is still very active in the company. He certainly doesn't need to go to work every day for the money. He is worth billions and is 75. I think he genuinely loves the work and he demands the same work ethic from those around him. I would imagine that when he is in the building, you can "feel" it in the air. That gravitas that was frequently on display when he was mayor of NYC is probably there every day whenever he holds court on a topic.

Second, I believe Bloomberg has grown organically. I think it's much easier to present a complete and consistent system when you've built most of it yourself. A company like TR has been built up through acquisitions and it at times shows in the product. Factset has adopted a similar strategy as of late.

Third, while the product at times has a distinctive UI/UX experience, it has always seemed super fast at least to my eyes. Less is true of their competitors.

Data brokers. Not a regular thing in comp.sci, but very much so in the world of finance.

> 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.

That is true for now. But chat is trivially implemented and the monopoly only holds due to network effects. And in the last few years Bloomberg have been so arrogant with all of their clients that there is critical momentum now to migrate away the chats and have everyone bar the actual traders share terminals.

(In unrelated news, Bloomberg's recent antics pissed our firm's senior guys off enough that made a few hundred Bbg terminal users migrate to Eikon, just to send a message...)

While I guess there are APIs, I don't get the impression they're easy to just integrate into any old workflow if the terminal is down the hall or even on the other side of your desk. It's all linked to that terminal, no? Pretty annoying if you ask me, from a programmers standpoint. Not to mention another case of closed, proprietary tech in the financial sector.

Bloomberg offers less restrictive APIs but they are even more costly than a terminal license and often require the end user to sign agreements with the data providers directly and pay additional royalties.

The #1 key / function on a Bloomberg terminal is the Message key. Just like people are on Facebook because other people are on FB and not MySpace is the driver behind BB's message function. Bloomberg messages are key for relationship maintenance and informal (or even semi-formal) information exchange.

BB is a little hard to learn how to use because of all the special keys and function short codes. But because of those special keys and functions, once you are trained, the system is blazing fast to operate. Blazing fast in a trading environment is especially important to grumpy trading staff.

Which gets us to deal capture... so with the BB messaging system being so popular and in the early days being used to talk about deals, Bloomberg created a deal capture element to the system. So in addition to chatting with your street counterpart, you could formally confirm the deal you just messaged with your buddy. So take the social, add the deal capture, and add the fast & reliable, you have a damn good vanilla dealing system with zero overhead beyond monthly terminal cost, which you are paying anyway.

Unlike Reuters market data client-side infrastructure, BB terminal implementation requires low technical knowledge. Leased line and a black box communications server and bango you are up and running. Reuters, you need multiple Unix servers, so you need a Unix admin plus 1 more guy in case Unix admin #1 goes on holiday, plus leased lines, plus the comms equipment, plus this and plus that.

My old firm had 1 employee dedicated to untangling Reuters bills as there were user costs, systems as data user costs, depreciation costs, real time data costs, blah blah blah. Reuters billing had elements of self-auditing and internal real time data subscription management. BB bills are a list of BB terminal IDs which are easily mapped to user X and department Y. BB real time data feed costs are tied to specific user. You could process a Bloomberg invoice in 30 minutes with a temp staff.

You no longer need special hardware to use the terminal. In fact the special keys are just mappings to your F keys, and you'll know which one is which without the keyboard. They have a sticker strip if you really need it. BTW the keyboard is crap, the buttons aren't balanced meaning the keys kinda stick, making you type slower.

Data is the only reason you need this thing. It's truly comprehensive how many data sources are all accessible through a single syntax. I've traded single stocks, corporate bonds, CDS, ETFs, index options, equity options, commodity futures, government bonds, interest rate swaps, IR swaptions, FX, FX options, and so on. You can get a price chart for all of them just by typing in a code followed by "GP". Or you can get relevant news.

On the API side, it's pretty easy to pull the data you need from the terminal. There's .NET, python, java, etc libraries for you, with lots of examples. And just about every imaginable field is there.

Bloomberg Chat is useful in certain parts of the industry. You can have all your brokers set up with individual 1-on-1 chats, yet still blast out a quote request as in "USD 5Y, 100K dv01, please" and they will all see it without knowing how many people you're talking to. A lot of people are still trading in the stone age, and Bloomberg is certified for keeping records for this sort of thing. You might have heard about BBG Chat in the recent LIBOR trials.

There's also a whole pseudo-exchange functionality. Basically you can get approved to get prices from each broker, and then you can trade with them by sending them tickets via Bloomberg. I always thought that was crap, but some people like it, depends on their niche.

It's kinda ripe for disruption though. 24K is a lot for the basic package, and if you want to actually get the data, rather than just the interface into it, you have to pay the underlying provider. That gets pricy quite quickly. Also live data costs money, too, and it's not going to be fast. Unless you get the leased line (if you're in the City of London, it's not a problem), which is more money again. And not especially fast, since there's an extra hop. I'm not sure I buy the argument that finance professionals know how to use it, so bbg is entrenched. If you understand what you're looking for, you're not going to have a problem finding it on some other system. For a lot of things such as common stocks, Yahoo and Google are not going to have any less information.

I've never thought highly of bloomberg's customer service. At most they're useful for discovering functions that you don't know the shortcut for. When there's anything remotely complicated, they seem to do a huge internal goose chase and then eventually get back to you with "can't do it". Basically anything API related, the Help Help guys will not know what to do and end up waiting for a dev. Also the official account manager keeps changing and every time you get a new one they pester you to show you some obscure functionality.

This makes me wonder how much should I trust everything else you said...

(FWIW, I find many of lordnacho's HN contributions to be decent and in many cases insightful).

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 mention are certainly easier to find on a terminal, but you can get them for free elsewhere. Also don't forget many things on Bloomberg require you to pay even more. Short interest data on European stocks for instance.

Just for the record, I'm looking at intraday data from a few years ago right now so that cannot be right.

> it's just a portal that gives the news

A portal? Bloomberg News has its very own reporters (and jourobots). They investigate and write original content. People usually don't buy the terminal (~2000 USD/month) only for that, but if they do, they can read everything directly in the terminal.

> What I don't get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard?

The monitor is, these days, only about branding. Ten to fifteen years ago, Bloomberg offered good-quality LCD screens with integrated mounting arms for 2 or 4, at a time when that was a pretty high-end setup. As LCD screens became cheap and ubiquitous, many users don't have the Bloomberg ones, but they still have the Bloomberg keyboard. It's useful because it has special labels for a few hotkeys, plus some of them have extras like fingerprint readers. If you lack the special keyboard you can press Alt+K on any keyboard and the terminal will show you a graphic of the special keys for reference.

But to really understand why they have a special keyboard, you need to look back a good long while. That's covered here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-blo... - the gist is that a "Bloomberg terminal" used to be a real terminal, connected to a magic box on the customer premises (which served several terminals). There have been many, many iterations of the terminal hardware, from a dedicated proprietary box, to software running on Sparc workstations, to software running on Windows, with the keyboard becoming more like a PC keyboard around the turn of the century.

> is it a VPN

No. Traditionally, customers connect their terminals back to the Bloomberg service via leased lines (i.e. not the internet). But for many years now you have the option of using the internet, though not everyone wants that.

> The cost of the product is ridiculous.

The cost of the product is much less than what some customers would be willing to pay. Most customers pay about the same monthly fee, regardless of where they are in the world, regardless of their corporate income statement, etc. So yes, it seems expensive to people who wouldn't get that much out of it. Some schools get a discount.

> Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware?

Bloomberg does not require specialized hardware at all. You can install it on any Windows laptop, and you are more than welcome to do so. As for cheaper--yes, there are lots of things which are cheaper, but you will be hard-pressed to find any combination of those which is still cheaper and yet does most of what Bloomberg does (i.e. has similar quantity and quality of data, and applications built up).

> I know Bloomberg is a politician

He is now, but he was not when his company went from 0 users to 100,000 users.

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

For example, Planet Money's toxic asset CUISP: 41161PUA9, part of HVMLT 2005-10 B6. I'd be neat to have visibility into that without paying bloomberg 20k.

I'd imagine that there are quite a lot of people who fancy trading as something of a hobby but who will never pay for Bloomberg.

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.

“Bloomberg just wants you to be locked into the ecosystem and never, ever leave. It’s like the Hotel California of financial data.” — Robin Wigglesworth

Another killer feature was that there were addins to excel spreadsheets.

Now, there are probably competing products, but Bloomberg has a large user base who are very familiar with its product.

Analysts and research roles aren't so beholden but bbg does data well while reuters does news well.

1. It is a all-in-one news source. There are a lot of features that allow you to monitor the news from many different sources in real time.

2. It is a social network. The built-in chat and email service is _really_ basic. But, just about every one working in Finance is on it, with their contact details and resumes. As a trader, you can legally close financial transactions on the Bloomberg chat, as one would over the phone.

3. It is a data sharing platform. Banks and other market participants contribute to Bloomberg data by sending information that is normally not visible in the market. For instance FX volatilities are quoted by banks on bloomberg in real time. This information is only available in few places.

4. It is an API that allows its users to use its data for custom analytics.

5. It is an execution platform, where you can book trades, follow their values and risk when the market moves, etc.

6. It is open to 3rd parties: some banks and other data vendors have their own pages on bloomberg (which I never had access to).

7. It has many many other stuffs. There is a restaurant review system. There is a classified section. There are things to monitor the weather. It has videos, maps, it's just huge.

Now - that is what people are interested in.

And then there are the things that Bloomberg shoves down your throat. Like the keyboard.

Bloomberg _forces_ you to buy their keyboards, at a very heavy price. The justification is the fingerprint reader, but that's really just a scam, because they put a $10 fingerprint reader onto a $10 keyboard, and sell you the thing at $500 a piece. So you either need to buy the keyboard, or you need to buy the B-Unit, which is Bloomberg very 2-factor authentication device which I assume is also quite expensive.

There is also the additional price you pay for API access, or to be able to see very specialized data. You pay for your private circuit to their servers (yep, it usually doesn't go through the internet).

Also a few words on the UI: it is f-ing terrible. Hit Escape, and you will find yourself on the start page. It doesn't matter that you were in the middle of typing an email or pricing a product, it just restarts your terminal. Most of the features are accessed by obscure four letter codes, that one has to learn to go back to. There is a search feature but everything is mixed in, and so you have to be pretty lucky to find anything useful using that. After a while though, the fact that the UI is so bad makes you feel "part of the club", I think many people would hate it if it changed.

$ apt install wallstreet

$ wallstreet

I created that for Ubuntu, as a follow-on to:

$ apt install hollywood

$ hollywood

Purely for fun. Try it!

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

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

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Finally, Bloomberg chat has strong network effects so even if you had all of the same data, many traders still wouldn't switch to you because they can't communicate with others still on Bloomberg.