Why it’s hard to kill the Bloomberg terminal (2019)
marker.medium.com
marker.medium.com
For those who dislike Bloomberg's UI, guess what, many people within Bloomberg do, too. But over the decades, their users have learned how to get to their favorite screens by navigating through a pseudo-CLI, and those users do not want to learn something new. Anyone who has ever tried to build a tooling company of any sort knows how hard it is to ask people to swap out one set of tools for another. Your ideal UI for Bloomberg runs directly counter to the deepest desires of their historical clients. Mastering the useless difficulty of that UI, too, means you are part of the in group.
Finally, Bloomberg has set peoples' expectations across work spaces, and it offers many financial firms a standard tooling. Trader X used a Bloomberg Terminal at Firm Y, well, she'll get up to speed quickly with us because we also use it.
[edited to recognize the author understands the social network side of Bloomberg terminals, in line with comment below.]
The author says: "[The terminal] is basically an exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary."
So I don't think they missed the point.
All of this makes me think the real value for many of a Bloomberg terminal is level 0 access to the insider trading club.
(Yes, I'm a cynical person. No, I'm not saying everyone who has a Bloomberg terminal is doing insider trading.)
That would make it a grey-area if it’s information that will eventually be made public within an hour. I guess it depends on the type of trades you perform...
Insider trading is complicated in the US because it is a creature of the executive branch and the courts. Congress largely quiet on exactly what constitutes it, and the regulator learning to leverage broad fraud statutes and a few wins in the court, alongside many losses.
The finance writer Matt Levine writes on this topic somewhat frequently, I scrounged up an example.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
There are many funds that base their entire existence on doing private research about companies and making trading decisions on this non-public research.
Visceral example: you spot a CEO get fatally run over by a car. You can immediately bet against the company via short selling, options, etc. even though the knowledge of his/her death is definitely non-public at that time.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/matthewzeitlin/why-bank...
It's hard for me to Google this because Bloomberg.com's own articles leave this out and simply refer to it as "a chatroom" not "a Bloomberg terminal chatroom".
Some chat snippets here:
https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-tha...
Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?
Doesn’t that benefit the company long term ?
There maybe two distinct markets and Bloomberg can captilize on both perhaps ?
The newer UI could be built as completely new platform “Bloomberg lite“ targeted towards say folks who can only pay 10,000 USD per year or only say currency traders or whatever ?
If interest starts tilting in the favour of newer version you can slowly add features to near parity while moving the older version even more expensive bracket and getting the newer version closer to old pricing ?
If enough people don’t want the new one you try again something different in a couple of years , until you get it right .
For years their major customers tried to force them into offering an Instant Bloomberg (IM) only license because senior traders insisted their PAs had it. It was only after several senior banks (whenever a single bank had tried the top talent threatened to quit) forced their users to use symphony that Bloomberg relented.
If there is enough interest on the new product you add features to new version and start hiking the price of both so relative price difference remains similar. There will not be a negative impact on revenue in that approach
You could grow the new product in a different direction completely for whole new user who are ready to pay 10,000 but not 25,000. The 25k terminal is still aspirational and exclusive as it is now, if the premise that people are paying for the exclusive network is true both products can work on their own and 10k community can feed into 25k on, if not well there was never a moat to protect in the first place.
i.e. Paying $25k for an IM system for a PA or some basic trade management functionality for a middle office analyst is ludicrous.
But you're also not going to force the trader bringing in millions to run 5 different systems when he knows Bloomberg can do it all and your competitor would give it to him.
If it would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue to shore up their UI to make it harder for a future competitor to disrupt them, that seems like a worthy use of money.
But also remember how much it costs and what their clients are willing to spend. It's not for the wider internet.
One thing people fail to realise is while not initially intuitive once you get used to it the Bloomberg UX becomes muscle memory to instantly load (they force all but the smallest customers onto leased lines) exactly the data you wanted in a dense consistent (UX on any remotely popular function is reviewed and guidelines enforced) easy to read form.
Despite this, they are sorta doing that.
This despite the fact that new features haven’t been released to the classic version for at least 3 years. Not only are they on a dated UI, they’re missing every single new feature that’s been released for several years (and that’s actually a shit load of features).
There have been a few newer functions that don't allow accessing everything by number shortcut and they're certainly not the most favourite parts of the terminal.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/12/why-was-libor-rate-ri...
> What the complaint makes clear is that it should not have taken five years to bring these charges. The traders effectively handed the Justice Department a slam dunk case by documenting each maneuver to rig the international interest rate benchmark known as Libor via instant messages recorded on a Bloomberg computer terminal.
Do people slide around in their socks or is there some kind of bowling shoes esque system?
IB has been fully monitored by compliance since its inception, so nothing changed there. Whether or not firms have working compliance departments is probably the question you should be asking :)
If you IB a CEO with a Bloomberg account from some university or so, you'll probably have little success getting a reply either.
I got the impression that it should be vulnerable to microsoft’s EEE.
It Microsoft Teams is any indicator, I can tell you right now that Microsoft is absolutely unable to disrupt and takeover any well-built product. Teams is the worst Slack ripoff I've ever used. Whatever advantage I gain from being able to chat in real-time is lost by constantly fighting with the tool, the notification noise and the fear of missing something in all that noise and terrible UI, not to mention the slowness when switching screens.
If their attempt at EEE'ing the Terminal is similar then Bloomberg has absolutely nothing to worry about.
And yeah, it's actually pretty extensible. There's a mechanism to create apps for the terminal, though I never really used those. Bloomberg will also sell you a programmatically-accessible data feed of pretty much anything they have, although those can cost well into six figures annually.
The reason why it won't be extinguished is that it combines the UI/API (which is not great) with market data feeds that are hard to replicate (because parts of it are scraped from bloomberg messages or only available on bloomberg), the instant messaging and chatrooms that also benefit from the moat of network effects, as well as a news service and macro data/company events/balance sheet data that integrate with each other and the market data feeds.
You could replace the news service and balance sheet data and some of the data feeds with Reuters Eikon, and the instant chat with Symphony - but they are both subpar products with even weaker UI than Bloomberg.
Or Word, or Windows, or Salesforce, or Zoom, or....
Which doesn't mean it hasn't changed. A lot of elements see minor improvements over the years. Also, a terminal with enough elements open easily takes up 16GB memory, something that wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago. Bloomberg was the reason we had to equip all machines with at least 32GB to run smoothly.
* money to pay for it
* a physical address to ship it to
* not be in a country sanctioned by the US (i'm just assuming)
So you need a shipping address.
(But yes, you at least need a b-unit to get started.)
I love Bloomberg Terminal's "UI". Really, I think it is the Bloomberg keyboard that enables such hard-to-replace efficiency. Perhaps one can draw analogy to the APL keyboard. The keyboard is still the most efficient input device we have. That is, I think, what is so difficult to "kill". Keyboard-driven computer use still works more efficently than the alternatives.
Anyone who replies to this comment using a keyboard is proving this point.
To provide a devils advocate to your last point, people could be most likely to respond on keyboards because a keyboard is an cost - efficient option for the majority of potential responders.
However there could be other tech that is more time - efficient. And for someone with an advanced condition such as ALS, it would be extremely inaccurate & inefficient in terms of either cost or time to use a keyboard for any sort of input where a high level of accuracy is required. Whereas a speech-to-text software connected microphone or some other system would be far more efficient in those categories for them.
All this to say that no, simply because one person replies to your post with a keyboard adds not one shred of validity to the vast over-generalization that "the keyboard is the most efficient input device we have".
I shall also now further assert to, in addition to disproving your central claim by counterexample, to have also disproved your ending statement (also by counterexample), by first, disproving your absurdly general central claim, and second, having done so using a keyboard as the input system for my response.
I think this is starting to change. I'm a Bloomberg user and I'm lower status than some of the non-Bloomberg users, such as high level software developers, at my firm.
This kind of reminds me of network engineers repping their ISP's AS numbers on conference badges and jackets and swag. If you're not one of the persons with full admin access on the core routers of your AS, you're not part of the inner circle.
Email is definitely an older electronic social network, only preceded by the telephone, postal mail, and face to face socialization.
Only by invitation, no free email provider to signup, $999 monthly fee and credit score check upon registration with minimum 801 score to get accepted. After that enjoy unlimited access to social feed of your fellow high profile millionaires. :)
At $20k+ per annum cost I wouldn't expect anything less. That said we Europeans have been asking for non American date format support for years but it's a won't fix. So I guess the fee still isn't large enough.
A big complaint I have is why can't I keep the data I download off the terminal for an exchange if I'm already paying the exchange fees in addition to bloomberg's annual fee? It's like renting data. Also it makes it difficult to switch to a competing product.
Another mild annoyance is the left field approach their reps have about the tech that is visible when they make their regular visits to your office. Your company might have invested in developing data screens ,(outside of Bloomberg) and some months later those views mysteriously become available as new functionality for all users. It's even worse if you use their API; eg, you might write a private back-testing indicator specific to your market and within a day or two it appears in their public indicator list.
FICC prices are also not quite that easy, there's a number there but what it means varies according to how you're configured. Things like the closing time and what sources go into the rate make a difference.
I spent a lot of time talking to bbg about what all the settings were.
Basically there's no way they would let a player like Bloomberg forward that kind of data to their users without getting paid a lot. In fact if you work in HFT you might have heard of something called a non-display fee which is a kind of ransom money they make that kind of firm pay.
Consumers like the ones who look at finance websites are probably not people they care to market to. Hence someone like investing.com can cut a deal to show live prices. They're not depth and pretty slow in any case.
But basically Bloomberg do not own the equity prices, the exchanges do.
AFAIK that's what grsecurity does. They distribute linux patches, which aren't copyrightable because they're GPL. To prevent anyone from distributing their patches openly (and putting them out of business), they have a clause in their contracts saying that if you distribute their patches, they'll terminate your subscription.
Charging for access to the data feed seems fair enough, but licensing the data? For a company that has a monopoly over what I consider public data £18k is outrageous.
You’d be surprised. Contrasting e.g. PitchBook, Reuter’s and Bloomberg, the latter’s <HELP><HELP> is like magic. They’ll happily step into your shoes and turn around quality work product for you. And on more than one occasion, they used feedback to add features to a screen.
It feels like there's some heavy gatekeeping that stops people from accessing the devs.
Thus, month/date/years is more "ergonomic" or "user friendly," if one is equally used to either format.
A similar example is time. The hour is usually what you care about most, followed by the minutes, with seconds most often being irrelevant. Fortunately, that's how everyone writes time.
As far as date formats go, apart from the ISO format, "21 Jul 2020" is definitely my favorite and always unambiguous. The only downside is that it's language dependent.
That's basically the European format.
They are very good having the reps take your ideas and sell them to you. I don't like how the reps swarm you and try to sit all day next to you watching what you are doing.
1) Emsx, this is a network that every sell side client is on that allows you to trade equities. This means that once 2 guys have a terminal they can trade through anyone that will talk to them.
2) Research tools, every broker has their research setup to be received through the terminal. Research providers can perms ion entire firms or single individuals for their research so no in house tools are needed.
3) user profiles. When you leave your current firm for another one you can keep your bloomberg profile(models, settings, research entitlements, etc). Given how often people move around between firms this makes the terminal very sticky. Without being able to keep your profile and data people would be far less likely to invest in using the terminal
4) They have "compliance tools" that every financial firm is required to have by law.
Need email,IB conversation, even slack archived? They have BVault.
Need real time monitoring of employee chats? They can do that
MIFD 2 regulations? They can help you manage your research to stay compliant.
Need basic portfolio risk reports run? They have PORT<GO> to make compliance happy.
At the time, the Australian stock exchange (ASX) ran its own sharemarket information service called "Jecnet". It was serial dumb terminals connected over phone lines back to an HP minicomputer/mainframe in Sydney. It was extremely popular amongst professional trading houses and institutional investors.
And the stock exchange decided to get out of the market providing information services, so they announced they were shutting down Jecnet.
So all the stockbrokers and institutional investors around Australia who used Jecnet - and there were alot - were going to lose their service. They would all be forced to move to a new system, away from the one they knew well.
And this guy turned up at equinet - I think he had previously worked for the ASX.
What he had done, is written a DOS Modula2 application which was:
-- a little server application which ran on an 80486DX2
-- it listened on a serial port to the ASX price feed which came in at 9600BPS
-- it had a serial controller card installed with 16 serial ports attached
-- it cached the ASX price feed
And here's the kicker - it pretty much exactly replicated the Jecnet functionality and user interface. (that's my recollection anyway)
So what this guy had done is effectively replace the HP minicomputer with a drop in distributed async server that cloned Jecnet.
So equinet bought/licensed this from him and went to all those Jecnet terminal subscribers and said "you don't need to lose Jecnet, we'll just switch the serial connection from the ASX to us". Brilliant success.
And in time many of those terminal users were transitioned to the much more powerful equinet Windows sharemarket information system.
But it was incredible at the time to see this guy essentially replace the entire functionality of the HP minicomputer system with this thing written to run on a 486.
Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?
What history are you interested in? I don't think anyone would have written anything about equinet - it was alot of fun to work at - a true technology startup before startups were called startups. Founded by a visionary genius called Peter Dunai. equinet wrote what must have been some of the very first Windows applications. I joined the company in 1987 and they had already written equinet for Windows then so it must have been Windows 1 or Windows 2. Peter Dunai backed Windows when the rest of the industry was still thinking the future was OS/2. Some of the smartest programmers I've ever met worked there.
equinet eventually merged with Bridge Information Systems - an American company. Or maybe it was Knight Ridder. Can't quite remember. The founder of equinet went on to found Iress which became the largest sharemarket information systems company in Australia and spread internationally.
The guy who wrote the software described above was John Cameron - a really nice guy who appears to have gone on to be extremely successful in financial trading software. http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron
>>That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS).
It was just a straight MSDOS application. I can't recall which flavor of Modula2 he wrote it with.
It must have been some pretty tight coding though because it had to run its end user application code and service the serial terminals and not miss inbound characters on a serial port.
It sounds like the early environment had that developer/engineer-driven quality to it that makes building awesome tech rewarding, and that the operations were managed by competence that was able to sustain that virtuous cycle. Both incredibly rare finds (particularly nowadays....)
Wow, Googling Equinet returns 92 results (hehe probably 94 in a day or so ;) ). I thought I'd heard of them before. IRESS is very interesting, TIL about that.
I get the impression Mr Cameron knew what was happening with Jecnet, knew he could replace it, knew that the result would very successfully be bought/licensed, and went to down... very nice. (Just turned up https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet..., possibly not directly relevant)
Regarding QDOS->MS-DOS, apologies for the unclarified obscurity: QDOS, or 86-DOS, was sold for $50k to Microsoft, which turned the product into MS-DOS and made the company. The Equinet situation sounded similar to the MS-DOS/Microsoft success. (Until two paragraphs ago I thought Equinet was still a still-extant major company; I think my brain might've been conflating "Equifax" and something else ending in "-net", or maybe my brain just filed the name away a very long time ago)
I do agree that not dropping characters from 16 users (plus a firehose) was pretty impressive on a... 25MHz? 33MHz? 486DX2. (Haha, how much RAM did it have...) I'm not too familiar with Modula-2 but poking around a couple of PDFs of different Modula-2 systems suggested they supported ISRs (interrupt service routines), so perhaps those were used for character buffering. (Or, likely, had to be used.) Now I'm idly curious: sure, the serial link was 9600 baud, but how fast did the feed run? 500b/s? 1KB/s? 100 lines/sec? (It would be interesting to know the average data rate of a major stock ticker in 1990!) Chances are this is a bit tricky to answer nowadays.
As an aside, it would be very neat if those early pre-Win3.x versions of Equinet for Windows were to ever fall off the back of a truck. They'd probably be as unusable as CompuServe clients, but still interesting from a historical standpoint, especially if they launch at all (there are people digging Win1.x/2.x-era apps off of floppy disks (and frequenting sites like winworldpc.com and vogons.org), and while I only poke around occasionally I've never seen any discussion of anything like this, ever, and I presume there is no knowledge it existed. Hence the historical interest perspective). Quite likely it's one of those "...uhhhhhh..." sorts of things though; and maybe others have been similarly curious before me as well.
What I seem to see in the comments is that "X is their killer app". But actually you'll find they have loads of X, Y and Z apps. You just think that it's X because most people are in a particular product.
The breadth is quite amazing. No matter what I was trading, BBG had a foot in the door. Want equity analyst data? Check. Want to look at OTC bonds from various banks? Check. CDS indices? Yep. CDS single name? Yep. Want a swaption calculator? Yep, even got vol surfaces for that. What about FX exotics? Sure. Just about anything I touched, BBG would have data or calculators for. Sometimes you found the data might be a bit sparse, but they'd have some upsell for you if you liked.
As for the APIs, there is a lot of digging if you're going to use the data for anything. Finding out exactly how some data column is collected is hard work, they don't make it easy to ask. You do have the upside that almost all data is collected the same way, so you don't spend a lot of time writing several download APIs.
There's also a lot of settings that affect the data that aren't obvious. Well perhaps it's in the documentation somewhere but it definitely helps to have someone around who has seen the quirks.
This is the key insight. They create exclusivity through their high price.
The social network is not nearly as valuable as the article makes out. It is only valuable insofar as the big banks are willing to trust you. If Societe Generale, UBS, Merus Capital, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and JP Morgan all are a little skittish about Bloomberg controlling the platform, they can go somewhere else and tell the traders they have to use it.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging-app-t...
The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities. It is data intensive, it is analytically complex and the second largest asset class, with 9 trillion outstanding, and you simply cannot trade them without a Bloomberg terminal.
I've seen it rolled out in a large bank to every single employee overnight. The numbers given the article seems underestimated and are certainly misleading without context. It's an enterprise software onboarding 50k users at once, nothing like the usual valley startup.
Bloomberg News famously abused the trust of the banks:
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/11615004/backed-by-15-banks-st...
If the banks mandate that their traders use something else, they will. I don't think they're quite there yet, but Bloomberg is not all powerful.
However it's a good story of making software in a very crowded domain and getting large enterprise customers right away nonetheless. Symphony is certainly is a catastrophe for Slack, a last minute competitor capturing all of the big financial firms.
I guarantee you that 98% of the users paying loadsamoney for Bloomberg have never and will never trade or analyse MBSs.
I agree with you on the IM - it's one of the lock-in factors but would have been killed by Symphony if it were even close to the largest one.
If you were a developer working with their API based feeds you wouldn't be saying that
In other words the best from the customer's perspective.
I loved it, and I’m on the younger side of finance workers. It looks serious and feels serious and is blazing fast.
If someone “modernised” the UI, they’d likely lose their multi-millionaire customers who appear just to have it for vanity’s sake. The UX is a gating mechanism that enhances the network’s value.
There are many other parameters that define a successful company. And I'd even dare to say that most of these companies are not particularly great at designing APIs [0].
[0]: https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/api-manager.h...
Their usability model is based a bit in the past, I agree. It can be a little convoluted and seems oldschool.
However reliability (which obviously matters the most) is the most rock solid API you can ask for. Compare it to anything else on the market. Their nearest competitor Reuters is kind of a joke compared to Bloomberg. Reuters is easier to use but it's not 100% reliable. Markets can stop streaming you data and you have no way of knowing etc.
Bloomberg is SOLID and you get what you pay for.
But bloomberg terminals do not need to be massively adopted. You don't need more (less specialized) terminal operators. That market/user-base didn't need to grow as much as excel users, browser user or CRM users.
As we reach peak digital tools/process adoptions I expect more and more specialized tools that don't try to be 'easy to use' first.
https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover
> Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg's current "complex" interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.
We've totally regressed. We've lost it. We've become enamored with aesthetics.
Btw, it would also be available as an electron app on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. And it will automatically update behind the scenes, who gives a fuck about your ability to control updates for a $25k/year business critical software.
I chuckled at this line.
My observations:
1- BBG is now part of a banks (and most large trading firms) infrastructure. BBG vCons are the standard way to confirm trades, its chat is one of three tools approved by banks, it has all the APIs to monitor every piece of communication, etc
2- BBG has proprietary data sets no one can get or on terms no one else will ever receive (Eg CUSIP).
3- I think that if the CUSIP license were more open and affordable, we would see many more competitive products. Instead S&P effectively has a monopoly. CUSIPS are the foundation of any alternative. The reality is you need many millions to get that feed and must charge hundreds to each customer. Few can do that
4- I think the idea of BBG as a social network is way over valued. It’s convenient yes but if you have inventory other people want in fixed income you’ll get the look. Every trader I know uses telephone and Outlook. It’s a moat but not the biggest in my opinion.
5- BBG does A LOT. I believe that a given user typically uses some small fraction of a % of functionality (like 2-3%), eg Chat + news + 2-3 pages. I think if one were to compete against Bloomberg, one would have to focus on not being everything (like Money.net or Eikon which isn’t working) but isolating key verticals and building a comprehensive alternative for that space. Going up against all tools everywhere globally feels like a fools errand.
For example, there is a site called Artemis for catastrophe bonds. Everyone serious in that market I’m sure has a BBG terminal and yet everyone also actively visits the site which is run by one guy.
Do you think that there is a possibility to transition across to ISIN, SEDOL, VALOR, etc.? Or will we be locked into CUSIPs for the forseeable future?
regarding 5:
Would you be more specific about how Eikon 'isn't working?'
Thank you for the informative post : )
#5 I probably shouldn’t have said that, at this point my anecdotal observation on it is too dated. At the time I worked in banking and evaluated it for our team it did a lot but not enough, was pretty but challenging to figure out and everything was being “worked on”. Everyone I knew either had BBG or FactSet.
Their software is a shitshow, for developers and end users. Their data curation is often lacklustre. But none of that matters.
Market data is an expensive game to get in to.
1) Its a bit of a cult with its crazy NYC main office
2) Culture is very sales driven (a bit like Oracle) and up or out hiring policies. Smart pricing - like MS Office. They know who and how to charge (for example giving free FIX connections etc). I once had a rep break down crying asking for another terminal subscription otherwise she was going to be fired.
3) The terminal is a bit like vim. Once you memorize the keystrokes you can do anything.
4) Cool biometric 2FA technology with the card
5) A lot of what they have is done better by other companies except the sales and the bundling.
During the interview, I was told that the modern UI development was done in JavaScript using a proprietary framework. Found that interesting to say the least.
I got rejected because I couldn't do some fancy binary tree algorithm trick, but I walked out of the interview thinking I didn't want the job anyways as I am not fond of proprietary frameworks (short of working at a FAANG level company anyways... I would consider BB highly prestigious, but still not at that level...)
So if they have switched to Electron - at least that will hopefully deliver a better UX - it’s not like users are meant to run other programs on those things (I think?) so they don’t care about Chromium’s memory usage.
Another financial firm I interviewed at - Tradeweb, also had something similar. Custom implementation, not Electron, but in their case, yes Chromium.
The big Prime desks support BB as well as Fidessa and other systems.
That's not exactly right.
There are two flavours of the terminal.
Anywhere, locked to a user via biometric login but can be installed on multiple machines, though running only on on e at a time.
Open Terminal, locked to a machine but anyone can log into it.
Its true that the open terminal wont' allow you to RDP into it, but bloomberg anywhere will let you rdp into a machine running it. I do that daily when working from home.
Financial data is kind of a racket.
The transition of the fundamental data towards being refinitiv branded is also very uncomfortable.
...I always wondered if the Eicon company that produced good ISDN cards, was somehow affiliated. Maybe they produced them to provide good uplinks for the Eicon platform.
Edit: Nope. No connection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eicon
New York Public Library provides access at their Business Center [1] curious if other public libraries have something similar.
[1]: https://www.nypl.org/collections/articles-databases/bloomber...
You can query real time feeds for instruments like BTC, ETH and LTC.
They have consolidated data feeds from about 8 exchanges.
But I don't work in the financial sector. I'd never want to either. But interesting to know it exists.
PS: A CLI/Curses interface sounds amazing to me though! :D
It's a terminal for access to market data and also has chat integrated into it. You can also trade on it if you want.
On r/wallstreetbets, you're only seeing the few who are randomly successful for short amounts of time because they are upvoted and the rest are lost in the crowd.
>On r/wallstreetbets, you're only seeing the few who are randomly successful for short amounts of time because they are upvoted and the rest are lost in the crowd.
That may be true but that does not mean there isn't a pattern. if they are all making fortunes with Tesla and Amazon, maybe that is an indication to be long Tesla and Amazon, although not necessarily with risky options though. Just buying the stock is fine. The monkey analogy implies no pattern.
Most Bloomberg Terminal users today are traders at the big investment banks. They don't try to beat the market, they make money on fees and through market making, which is Millions (tens or hundreds) per year, so $25k per employee is a small cost for them to keep doing that.
> You can get all the other stuff for free using thinkorswim and other services
I highly doubt this. Bloomberg is not about the services but about the data: the breadth and depth of it. They have been collecting data since the 1980s, which is like dinosaur era for finance. It doesn't matter what services they provide, it matters they have data! Your are missing the most important point of what makes Bloomberg useful as a vendor.
> Reddit's Wallstreetbets is free to join and it seems people there have a knack for beating the market and knowing what to buy before it becomes really big
At this point I am starting to think this post is some low quality bait, you are young/naive, or simply too arrogant.
> They have been bullish on tesla and amazon for a long time
Great! Did you buy any Tesla or amazon when it was cheap ? Good for you.
> Like any community, part of the challenge is filtering out the noise from the signal.
Blanket statement which tells you what you need to do without saying how. "The only rule of making money is to not lose money". Such wow. You can do better than this :P
I expect a downvote, but maybe this time I was constructive enough not to get one, lets see if hacker news will disappoint me again!
>"The only rule of making money is to not lose money".
Buffett's number one rule is not to lose money. Sometimes pithy quotes hold lot of wisdom.
>Great! Did you buy any Tesla or amazon when it was cheap ? Good for you.
yeah i got in on those many years ago
Of course. It's just that I believe that unless you are willing to pay >= $100k for a developer's salary you can't do the same as the terminal. If you have a budget for a dev then by all means get the data yourself and do your own stuff ;)
> Buffett's number one rule is not to lose money. Sometimes pithy quotes hold lot of wisdom.
I'm glad his wisdom helps you. I think it's a marketing slogan since to me it conveys no information, or no more than stating the desired outcome without giving you an idea of how to do it, which is not useful.
Also, I did get a downvote for expressing an opinion! Only a few more and I'll be out of this platform ;)
That's why hedge funds who actively trade bonds are far fewer than those who trade equities. I can start a stock fund with a phone and a laptop. I can't start a bond fund without paying for Bloomberg.
You may think that is true for stocks. I don't, but for the sake of argument I'll concede it. But Bloomberg has never been focused on equities. For fixed income trading, it's a necessity.