Isn’t community the single biggest advantage of Bloomberg Terminal? And no one is focusing on that, but on new fancy charts. That’s probably why Bloomberg doesn’t have real competition.
Bloomberg has all sorts of connections with hundreds of different economic data providers and news orgs — including some they they own themselves.
It’s crazy how you can get CPI prints at 8:30:00.001 because presumably they have some embargo arrangement with the FOMC.
They have a corporate actions database with hundreds of thousands of mergers, dividends, minority stakes, etc.
They have millions of news articles, hundreds of thousands of securities, symbology for all of it.
And don’t even get me started on the alternative data in Bloomberg: weather data, maritime ship position, satellite maps, polling data, crypto prices, corporate hierarchies, holdings/investor data, millions of bios, etc.
It’s an empire of data and it’s all in one place.
1. Do something that doesn't scale: provide clean, reliable feeds for everything + whatever new thing clients want
2. Package the above in a way that's easier to explain/sell: a device (and now, API)
3. Control the interface
It establishes and grows a moat by 1. It eased sales and prevented competitors from stepping in between them and the customer (and therefore eventually being able to cut Bloomberg out) via 2 & 3.
Consequently, it turns any potential competitor's value calculus into either (a) attempt to reimplement a subset of Bloomberg's offering, thus inviting the "Why not buy an integrated solution?" customer comparison and fighting against integrated pricing economies or (b) reimplement the entire Bloomberg offering from ground up, which is pretty much impossible.
And the entire time a competitor is spending time and effort on (a) or (b), Bloomberg is collecting use patterns and new feature requests from its actual, day-to-day users.
As retail typically trade stocks and not bonds, retail traders miss what makes Bloomberg terminals indispensable for institutions. You cannot trade bonds without one.
Yup.
In a previous life I worked in the vicinity of someone who only occasionally traded corporate bonds.
When that time of the month/quarter came up, they would do some limited research as best they could, but then ultimately the phone would be picked up to someone with a Bloomberg and the words "what does your Bloomberg say about X ?" uttered. They would only make their decision after that.
Bloomberg have built themselves a truly solid moat when it comes to fixed-income data.
never used their data myself so can't say but i'm curious.
No.
Calling Bloomberg a 24k/year chat box is doing Bloomberg a great disservice.
The reason Bloomberg is 24k/year is because of the extensive global dataset.
You can get everything from the latest on Apple to the latest on an obscure company in Mongolia.
You can do extensive comparisons and analysis on a global basis.
And the data is cleaned and standardised. So no concerns about messy dirty data that is often found in cheap or free options on the internet.
(also they do have a ton of data and it's better than almost anyone else)