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 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.
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 familiarity and some information oligopolies
I would argue they have established a sort of universal minimum threshold of information within the financial industry, across a ton of financial markets. This provides a certain amount of certainty/consistency within markets(really any sort of pseudo monopoly in a knowledge space does). Particularly in the news space, it sort of lets people assess to what degree they might have a competitive advantage by the degree to which their data is more accurate/earlier than that on the terminal/data side.
It seems they must be getting the data through agreement with the companies they're collecting the data on. I wonder where the line is drawn between what they're doing and commercialised insider trading.
You're kidding right? It is more than 99.99% correct guaranteed by an SLA. You can have errors as with any system but they're very open about it and correct it when its wrong & inform you, which is extremely rare (seen it only 1ce myself)
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..)
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.
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.
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 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 think that using a vim key binding extension like those that are available in most modern editors would have the same effect? Or is part of the magic of vim being forced to use the key bindings?
It's definitely important to force yourself to use the bindings when you're trying to learn them. Also, the Vim bindings in a lot of other editors have subtle issues and/or missing features that make them a pain to use if you're used to using the full range of commands in real Vim.
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.
What gives me real hope is the insertion of vim modes into GUI editors. It lets me use languages that need IDE assistance to be practical (I'm looking at you, Scala), while still holding on to the Old Ways.
Along those lines, I'm really excited about Neovim's work to make the editor embeddable. Rather than reimplenting a fraction of Vim/Neovim, you can embed all of it.
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.
Every major programming language uses english keyboard. I'm a starter amateur coder but first thing I did was learn the en-us keyboard layout. There are options to use Alt-Gr accented letters for spanish which I use but also for combining letters which should work for finnish/swedish.
Programming languages don't use keyboards; they use some sets of characters, typically a subset of ASCII. Keyboards then can produce those characters.
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.)
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.
This makes no sense. Vi emulators get into all kinds of text editors and IDEs for a reason, not the other way round. I haven't used a Dvorak keyboard so I don't know anything about that (though many sources seem to suggest its effect is debatable), but on Vi/Vim your comment couldn't be more wrong.
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 sense where that idea comes from.
That isn't the point of the OP though? Think the point being that the inspiration for a proprietary system that does that is the Bloomberg Terminal. Although they're used all around the world, seems that their use and functionality is perhaps more in the American zeitgeist.
Yes, now that you mention it, probably ("where that idea comes from"). Nevertheless, strikes me as a totally absurd comparison - I'd never associate a bog standard Bloomberg Terminal (used in NY, HK, London, Frankfurt, ...) with some fictitious device from US movies.
It's a really strong analogy to how people think of command-line hackers, though. You type what seems like a bunch of gibberish with lots of slashes and hyphens at a hundred words a minute and then the computer turns into a rainbow-barfing unicorn. It doesn't seem that way to the hacker, because it's just another language.
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 :(
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.
Still, the AI matches you into an "audience" which is targetable. It doesn't tell the advertiser that they're advertising to John, Jane, and Joaquin, specifically.
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.
Facebook is in the business of making money off the assets. The thing that keeps them off the worst edge is that they want to stay in business long term.
Non-Bloomberg users retain access to one component described above, the "hit F1 twice and immediately be connected" option, thanks to librarians.
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.
How do I answer questions about oil tanker availability? I don't see anything in the manual about that. I guess it might be under BMAP or BI, but nothing obvious stands out to me...
> It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information.
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.
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.
Some of it comes from paper documents and PDFs. Bloomberg has a team of people who organize and cross-reference such documents.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the example. What you just did is one of the hardest things to communicate about data. A casual user would never notice this. I find "data curation" doesn't always get the importance it deserves.
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.
As others have mentioned there is a large amount of expert knowledge to collecting and organizing extremely disparate data sets. There are also longstanding business relationships, lots across a lot of markets, and a reputation for great data security, that has many pricing sources and exchanges offering data almost exclusively through the terminal, and some folks putting their own data into the system. The risk with mishandling(making unavailable or available at unreliable/inconsistent times, for example) some of that data is just so high that 30+ years of reputation in some spaces is worth a (maybe perceived) premium.
Some of it is fed in directly by the providers. For example Barclays and JPMorgan interest rate swap rates.
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.
So its like a proprietary google. Google incentivizes people to put their information publicly so they can crawl it, bloomberg gathers the info for a price. I see the two as complementary-but-future-competitors.
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.