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Comment by nuthje | Hacker News Reader

Main value is the chat still.

For equities that is true and most Bloomberg functionality can be replicated with Sat Interactive Brokers plus some data subscriptions. Doing fixed income manually without the data pre populated in Bloomberg is very painful. But yes, the chat is where the franchise is and recent SEC actions punishing any non compliant communications like texts or alternative messaging services with massive fines have only given that moat another decade at least of invulnerability.

There are other non-Bloomberg compliant chat applications. Symphony is the big one

https://symphony.com/

but also whatsapp and imessage from company-owned devices. The fines were about chat communications from personal devices.

I think you're missing the point. it's not the chat application. it's the participants that are in the chat in Bloomberg

True

Maybe in theory. The message I get from almost everyone at a regulated institution is Bloomberg, e-mail, or voice. When the SEC is on a warpath, compliance and legal departments don’t play with anything but the clearest black and white lines to optimize for the convenience of staff. It is frustrating because it imposes a monopoly tax on financial market participants to get a Bloomberg or be shut out of information flow which is death in markets. I’ve yet to find anyone I deal with who says hey find me on Symphony.

I work at a financial institution and it's symphony for internal communications. I much prefer it to teams tbh.

What is Sat Interactive Brokers? I've used Interactive Brokers for a long time and never heard of Sat.

That is what I heard terminal was the membership fee to chat and Veblen good of office power.

Who did you hear that from?

Bloomberg provides you normalized data across all asset classes, cross asset portfolio analytics and management tools. First party trading venues, access to the world's largest broker network, immediate access to news including news sentiment indicators across the terminal offering. Access to it's own brokerage (trade book is still a thing I think), buyside and sell side Order Management platforms, APIs to feed the same stuff into your excel and servers.

Did I mention all this tooling is engineered to be compliant across regulatory regimes.

So yes chat is important and having a BB terminal definitely separates the men from the boys but that's additional to the indispensable functionality the platform itself provides.

It was a single person office that acted as a black box between traders. He had aBloomberg terminal to do it all.

How does BBG chat compare to other internet chat? Does it get as raucous?

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