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Comment by zhte415 | Hacker News Reader

I never found presentations that hard. For most presentations I kept an Excel template with the BBG Excel plugin, which would then be linked by Powerpoint.

But I do agree with the point that not everyone is a trader. The quality of a lot of macro data often wasn't there. For this I also had a Datastream terminal, which excelled in longer term macro data.

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Certainly Excel works for many people, but there was a significant number of users who wanted a vertically integrated presentation/reporting platform. I think there is still room for innovation in this area.

I agree that there may be space for vertically integrated presentation/reporting platform, but do you think this space is as lucrative as the actual data streaming? My guess would be that financial services customers would be very price insensitive to mission critical/directly revenue generating data/analysis (hence, Bloomberg's subscription costs) while a reporting platform would be just a nice plus but a much harder sell. Thoughts?

Presentation is pretty important in much of the business because that's how the products are sold and fees justified.

Let's say your firm trades bonds. Your product is your expertise in trading those bonds, and you have to sell that expertise. How are you going to do that? Much of it is still reputation, but the days of closing a pension fund with a few martinis and your good looks are coming to an end. You have to have the numbers to back up your claims.

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