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Comment by Jorge1o1 | Hacker News Reader

I would have to argue that while community is a huge part (a lot of trades get done over IB), the biggest advantage is actually data.

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.

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It’s lock on data as well. On the one hand I hear all the 20-30 year olds complaining about BB on a daily basis and on the other hand we have million dollar models (in cost, billion dollar in value) locked-in on BB data sources. Just changing a data source is a major model change with god knows what hoops the regulator puts you through. So I just kindly explain to the youngsters there is a lot we can do for their happiness, but switching from BB is not one. Writing this I think some consultancy could specialize in the BB API. That’s all we need.

BB is an excellent and well-executed business model.

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.

… and shipping them daily :)

Does the BB API have public documentation? Or is that behind the paywall?

It’s public, there is also a good 3rd party wrapped on pypi that makes it much easier to use.

https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/support/api-library/

They also have reference data on tens of thousands of bonds, and have correctly implemented bond math and risk analytics for these issues.

As retail typically trade stocks and not bonds, retail traders miss what makes Bloomberg terminals indispensable for institutions. You cannot trade bonds without one.

In fact Bloomberg initially started as a bond calculator.

> 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.

yea, its worth mentioning IB has very good execution but very bad data, to the point paying for their "realtime" data (and unusable historical) is nearly an inside joke of spotting suckers.

can you elaborate on the bad data from IBKR? a few people mentioned looking at them for data sources but didn't bring up any quality issues.

never used their data myself so can't say but i'm curious.

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