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Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that this feature is going to be used that often, for two main reason:

(i) when a Bloomberg user uses the terminal to lookup securities and other economic/financial information, they don't want to be open about it (trading strategies, investment focus, etc, are well guarded secrets and become real competitive advantages),

(ii) most of the firms that use Bloomberg Terminals have Twitter and other "social" networks blocked by firewalls.

Correction: given that it is a read only, "curated" list of users, I do believe it will be used. I was skeptic about the ability of being able to tweet, but it's been made clear that tweeting won't be permitted.

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I disagree with you and I suspect it will be used by more than a few traders as an indicator of sentiment - they'll use it a way to quickly gauge what people are thinking about particular companies and use that as another variable for their trading/sales decisions.

Your two reasons don't make a lot of sense to me, based on my experience in the industry. Specifically -

(i) If you're using a Bloomberg terminal, it's somewhat implicit that Bloomberg knows what you're using it to look at (as well as who you're emailing via it etc). If people didn't trust them not to tell everyone else what you're looking at, no one would use Bloomberg. Your strategies shouldn't be a secret from the rest of your desk or your own company (assuming you're at a bank/hedge-fund/prop-house rather than a rent-a-desk prop-shop where everyone only works on their own accounts and thus the guy next to you is your competitor). The majority of traders aren't executing their own strategies anyway, but are working within a set of parameters set by their company or clients.

(ii) a) This is becoming less true, more and more banks etc. are allowing access to view Twitter, but not to post to it. b) I think you might have missed the point of the service where Bloomberg is offering a read only Twitter feed to avoid the problem of Twitter being blocked.

Trading strategies within a floor are shared, never with other firms, that is simply to shoot yourself on the foot.

Regarding Bloomberg knowing what you search for and look at, the confidentiality clauses are pretty strict in the service agreement.

Yes, that was the point I was making - your original post was implying that people won't use a Bloomberg feature because "other people might work out how they're trading".

i) From the OP: "the function does not allow users to tweet"

ii) The bloomberg connection doesn't go over their local firewall in the way you imagine. The tweets will be shown inside the terminal app, not via any connection to twitter.com

i) oversaw that statement, makes more sense now.

ii) understood, I guess you are right and makes all the sense to do it that way.

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