Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?
From what I understand so far, it's just a portal that gives the news. What I don't get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard? I am not sure how is the network connected, is it a VPN. The cost of the product is ridiculous. I do not understand why are people paying for it. Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware? I know Bloomberg is a politician, has he managed to pass some ridiculous law that forces everyone to pay for his product?
P.S.: I do not understand Finance or the wall street world. But I am curious to know about the tech they use and why they are paying a huge amount for it.
231 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadThe reason they're still a monopoly is because knowing how to navigate a Bloomberg is a critical skill for most finance professionals, and now that they have that skillset, they can be very productive moving around in it. A different (better?) UI would require they re-learn everything, which is not going to happen. And when financial professionals are making half a million a year, paying $24k/year for a terminal so that they can be productive isn't a bad investment.
(Source: have a couple friends at Bloomberg. One is in their UI department, and keeps having his proposals for better UIs shot down for business reasons. Also married a financial professional who had to use a Bloomberg in her days as a bond trader.)
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You're right.
Way back when, only bond traders used Bloombergs. Equity and FX guys used other things (Quotron, Reuters, maybe?)
You can find some background here on what it does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal
"Potential users don’t want to get onboard unless all the other people in their ecosystem are on the service. That dynamic obviously keeps most people from joining Symphony. Most everyone working in financial markets is already on Bloomberg, and it would take virtually everyone leaving at the same time to give Symphony critical mass.
“I think Facebook is the best comparison,” Ayzerov says. “If Facebook had only one fourth of your friends, you wouldn’t use it. The advantage of Bloomberg is that every financial person has it.”"
See http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3572874/banking... for some of the obstacles that Symphony faces
* It is a well accepted reference. You will often see a screenshot of a bloomberg terminal as "proof" of something
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo-idUSKCN1...
The financial world does not rely on iron-clad cryptographic security. It relies on a very well developed system of layers of trust.
The ability to trade is perhaps no so important these days given the advent of algo trading/stat arb, but it serves to emphasize the point that there is more to the terminal than just viewing the data.
Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don't mean relatively basic info like "What's the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?" or "What's the current CDS spread for Citibank?" that you can easily google for but also stuff like "Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?" and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.
Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).
Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.
I'm sure you could have better text editing shortcuts (power Sublime/Atom users maybe), or a better keyboard (Dvorak for example), but once people do things a certain way and develop proficiency, it's often tough to change.
I guess you have never really used vi to make such a comparison, same as op has probably never used the Bloomberg Terminal.
Does this exist? I'd love to move more to Vim!
This depends on typist and keyboard; I use Swedish/Finnish keyboard and touch-type, and hitting j four times happens without looking or thinking. Hitting } requires me to lift my right hand from typing position, hold Alt-Gr, press 0, and then go back to typing position.
But there's at least one attempt at a nice remapping for dvorak.
And yes, typing [\]{|} and so on is inconvenient on my keyboard. I particularly detest the choice of \ over / in MSDOS and Windows path names.
I occasionally use US keyboard layout just to get around these difficulties, but whenever I arrive at some random computer, it will have the local layout.
(This is particularly confusing when going to France or Germany with they AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.)
While a moat makes it hard to attack it is not always the case that a moat is worth attacking. Just because the target seems weak makes it not valuable. Bloomberg is a private company so numbers are hard to get. What is obvious is that financial services consolidation, the movement to index investment and automated trading makes terminals not a growth market.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/business/dealbook/the-blo... > All service providers for Wall Street, not just Bloomberg, are unusually vulnerable at the moment. The financial industry is in the middle of an aggressive run of cost-cutting as it grapples with new regulations and changes in the markets. A Bloomberg contract, which can be upward of $100 million at larger institutions, is a tempting target to whittle down.
> The number of Bloomberg terminals grew only 1.9 percent, to 325,000, last year. In the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of terminals grew at an average rate of 12 percent each year, with most companies signing on for multiyear contracts.
There may be some demand for cheaper terminals but whether this amounts to enough to build out the expensive data collection organization is far from clear. As may have pointed out quality matters. Opportunities may become larger iff Bloomberg has to cut cost and quality decreases.
SHIP Shipping functions menu
VSRC Vessel search
VSTK Vessel capacity data
FLET Aggregated fleet data
FIXS Research daily global tanker fixtures
BFX Baltic freight index
BMAP Generate energy-related maps
If you're wondering why the original documents are not more directly machine readable, consider that some of them are published by companies due to regulatory obligations, and those companies would much prefer not to publish the information at all. So making the documents easier to consume is where Bloomberg comes in--because the originators don't want to.
There's lots of financial data available on yahoo, for example, but it's just lousy quality.
http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/THB=X/?p=THB=X
You see the graph on the right, it hovers around 30 USD/THB (that's 30 THB per USD, in somewhat confusing FX convention).
Now click on 5Y, then click on 10Y, and compare. The 10Y graphs probably includes some wrong blip around 700, which is why the 10Y graph scale is from 0 to 750, and you just see a basically flat line displayed at the bottom.
(The 10Y PHP graph is fine, while the 10Y INR graph has a similar issue).
So, if you do any trading strategy where you're trying to figure out whether your current value is relatively high or low by comparing it to the 10Y max and min, you'll most likely be off.
Or consider equity, for example. To properly deal with shares, you first need the trading calendar for every exchange (when is the exchange open and you can make a trade), and the settlement calendar (when will the shares actually be settled). US settlement is typically T+3, Europe T+2, UK Gilts T+1, but all according to certain calendars, naturally. These calendars vary by country, and even exchange and even function (in other words, there might be days when shares at a certain exchange trade, but don't settle, and vice versa).
Bloomberg has all these details - good luck finding it on Yahoo or anywhere else, really.
To get from raw data to data you can use can be a hard, tedious and difficult slog. I agree that it's often undervalued. On the other hand, with Bloomberg you certainly pay for it! :-)
And don't get me started with corporate actions (stock splits, mergers), dividends (some jurisdictions announce gross divs, Australia announces net divs; Korea announces AFTER the ex-date; some shares pay a dividend in a ccy different from the ccy the shares are denominated in, etc.), unscheduled exchange closures (due to terrorism, typhoons, etc.), stamp duty and taxes, 1 week holidays for Chinese New Year that screw up the rate curve (because 1d and 1w LIBOR cover the same period), quanto futures, etc.
2.5 hours in the morning (10:00 to 12:30), 1.5 hours in the afternoon (14:30 to 16:00), who needs more than 4 hours trading a day?
Shame they extended it in 2011.
There is a network effect: all the customers the dealers want to reach are on Bloomberg, so they have to publish on Bloomberg. If someone else comes along and says "publish on my channel too", that's extra work, so probably won't get done.
I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sense where that idea comes from.
That's not sold
No, given freely away for "protection".
Evil mode off:
I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.
Why does 'tac' mean "reverse abcd to dcba, line-by-line, on the input stream? Human brevity and wit. and then look at the Bloomberg Terminal and ask "Why does 'OTFN'* mean "empty oil tanks departing ports with a cost modifier proportional to the time left in port and risk of loading delays vs. departure cutoffs?", it's for the same human reasons: someone wanted to type as few letters as possible to get something done, and came up with something that seemed good at the time, and it stuck.
Hacking shows always show us people typing three commands and ending up at the [fictional agency of choice] here. Bloomberg can work magic beyond belief with three commands, and even more amazingly dedicated the HELP button on every keyboard to "press it repeatedly and HELP opens the chat to you", which is maybe the best approach I've ever seen.
* OTFN "Oil The Fuck Now" may or may not exist in Bloomberg Terminal, I sadly do not have access :(
For example:
https://youtu.be/f86VKjFSMJE?t=23m45s
What I love about HN. I read one thing that sounds great and authoritative in a subject that I know nothing about. Just to have someone else rain on the parade! Which point of view is correct? I don't know (so I upvoted both..)
"sounds" being the operative word. Lots of ... lets say 'articulate' people on HN, in general. Current thread excepted.
For added-cost datasets, they're mainly a reseller for a 3rd party data provider and SLAs need to be checked to see what you're getting.
For checking via other sources, this is a minimum in finance. Reconciliation / validation needs to be done at every step something new is introduced, and just for the heck of it usually anyway.
A web search for "24/7 ask-a-librarian" returns a page full of different libraries that always, without end, offer a human being ready to try and help you consult through the world of knowledge. If you're polite, they'll do their best to help.
It's not like Bloomberg, where you can just interrupt your work by hitting HELP and magically get a solution provided. But it is a little-known HELP button for information research.
I disagree that the information is hard to find. I think a lot of the data is publicly available. Bloomberg "normalizes" it for you and makes it easy and quick to access. As you point out, they have depth and breadth. And that is where the value lies.
Many people have tried to compete with Bloomberg. Millions and millions of dollars have been poured into competitor products. In my opinion, you will never be able to replace Bloomberg. The key, however, is to break up the functionality. Build a better graphing tool, a better chat app, a better financial analysis tool, a data API that plugs into Excel, Python, C++, etc... etc...
Also, the value offering of bbg goes beyond the terminal. For example, Bloomberg sells a lot of their "static" data in daily or hourly file updates (for $100Ks/year). They are the central hub for RFQs and IOIs. They also pour money into machine learning techniques to provide better/faster news. They sell their news firehose for top dollar and people will pay for it.
Another aspect is trust. If you are trading billions you want the information/trade data "currency" everyone else uses. I built backends converting MBS bid to yield and if it wasn't tuned to a 1/16 or better of Bloomberg, it wasn't usable.
Bloomberg also offers custom studies like "fear/greed" which may have some value.
TR/Thompson Reuters also has a competitive product for much less and you can't really go wrong with either for 99% of use cases.
There are also many stand alone news sources you could use. Benzinga comes to mind as one example.
Interesting note - Bloomberg is highly protective of their IP and has been know to write takedown notices of screenshots posted online.
// built 2 SaaS Fintech systems
Mike Bloomberg started the company because while working at Merrill Lynch (in the 80ies) he thought the computer terminals banks used at the time to see stock and bond prices where ridiculous. He got funded by Merrill Lynch and disrupted the industry, overtaking rivals like Reuters (which well into the 90ies was usually considered the most trustworthy source for stock data)
You needed their special hardware only until the late nineties (the "Bloomberg box" - consider that up until around 96 or 97, only few employees would have internet access on their desktop, even inside "bulge bracket" investment banks): nowadays, you can get Blooomberg terminal on their workstation or on your own hardware. Likewise, you can run in on a dedicated connection, or on your normal internet line.
The key element of Bloomberg terminal is reliability: it feeds data you can usually trust and price feeds you can almost certainly trust. When you are checking prices changing several times a second across exchanges in different part of the world that's no easy feat). That's crucial when millions of dollars are at stake.
Second is the ability to access 80% of the data and information you would ever want to check wihout leaving the terminal.
Third ingredient is ease of use.
Fourth is incredible customer service.
Fifth is innovation: they continuously innovate, improve old features, add new features, introduce access to new data/information.
Once you remove the cost of the underlying live price feeds (from stock exchanges), The Bloomberg terminal is not that expensive for what it does. Bear in mind its customers are people that spend their day optimizing their financial decisions: if there was something cheaper working as well, they would go for it. If there was something working even better, they would go for it, probably even at a higher price point (because that's how the economics in the banking and investing world work).
Fun read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-blo...
Solly infamously demutualized, under John Gutfreund, and in that process, Bloomberg left, presumably with any IP waivers he needed (after all, they had to get partners to agree to be paid off, and that was a political battle) and from that position, it was I imagine, certainly easier, to attract Merril to invest in the new venture, as 50% partners.
Merill later sold i think all but a token stake, and Bloomberg was the majority buyer for their shares.
At no time did Michael Bloomberg work for Merill Lynch.
His timing, and trading, was impeccable.
Solly was long the 800lb gorilla of fixed income.
Coming from a former partner, the intimacy he had with the intriciacies of data (especially the archaic clearing systems he led to be automated, literally Solomon Brothers cared only for their front desks by habit, legendarily earning so much as to get away with a devil may care attitude long past when most firms would have been bust by conterparties declaring oprisk indigestible) he probably could have held a beauty parade for potential investors. Merril was probably chosen for two equally important characteristics, however: passivity as investors, and out size retail salesforce, immediate users for new equities data products Bloomberg wanted to launch.
Pretty sure they were long one of the largest Tandem customers, and may still rum Tandem for messaging. As noted in other comments, their messaging is nigh bullet proof. As is also noted in other comments, they give a real damn about latency, so make telcos (at least telco sales reps) weep no doubt more than most customers.
If there is a lesson for the startup world, i think it is this (besides way to trade to get his investment): there are apparently infinite messaging products, and a multiple thereof of features for messaging, but if you want to grow a high margin niche monopoly, or just a business period, build your messaging like civilization itself depends on it. How many hundreds of billions in capital have been made and lost in what are essentially messaging products? But name one that can count a few nines of reliability you'd entrust your capital, your family's emergencies, your daily banking, to, that is on the web?
While I guess there are APIs, I don't get the impression they're easy to just integrate into any old workflow if the terminal is down the hall or even on the other side of your desk. It's all linked to that terminal, no? Pretty annoying if you ask me, from a programmers standpoint. Not to mention another case of closed, proprietary tech in the financial sector.
Bloomberg offers less restrictive APIs but they are even more costly than a terminal license and often require the end user to sign agreements with the data providers directly and pay additional royalties.
- news articles
- squawk
- economic data releases
- historical and live market data
- asset pricing
- charts and analytics
- click trading
- trade execution and transaction cost analysis
- trade order management and post trade processing
- portfolio and risk management
- alerts
- chat
- mail
- Excel integration
- amazing stuff like DINE<GO>, FLY<GO>, and POSH<GO> (lol)
there's probably a ton more stuff that i don't use and don't know. bloomberg is a mile wide and a mile deep in some areas.
you can get any of these features individually from plenty of service providers in the market. some are less specialized and cheaper and some are more specialized and more expensive. if you don't want to manage fifty different contracts with different service providers bloomberg provides a one-stop shop.
bloomberg is more than just data now. it wants to be absolutely everything that a financial firm needs - front office, middle office, back office.
Can you ... can you order takeout from a Bloomberg terminal?
I doubt food delivery falls within their expertise or even scope of compliance, in the same way you still can't buy flight tickets from fly<go>, but if they want to do it, if they ever do, seamless has no choice but to take them seriously.
"POSH, a Craigslist for the wealthy"
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloo...
Banking software also use this type of codes to reach different functions: post a cheque, take a draft, print an account statement, update customer record, loan balance/amortisation/payback history; in short, they do everything with short 3-4-5 letter keywords. This type of system has very high learning curve ("Hey Alex, what's the keyword for locker rent arrears list?"); but it is a joy to watch competent people operate the program to get things done.
Many business software also work this way (SAP ERP/Oracle Financials), but none of them are likely to be as fast as Bloomberg though. AutoCAD also has some commands like this (like Emacs'/Vim's ex/M-x prompt? ":"/"M-x"). I wish other consumer software also allowed access to screens/dialog boxes and functions in this direct manner without having to click menus and buttons a thousand times.
Almost. You can ask the helpdesk, and get decent answers along the lines of a telephone number for a restaurant but not 'this place is recommended'
> it's just a portal that gives the news
A portal? Bloomberg News has its very own reporters (and jourobots). They investigate and write original content. People usually don't buy the terminal (~2000 USD/month) only for that, but if they do, they can read everything directly in the terminal.
> What I don't get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard?
The monitor is, these days, only about branding. Ten to fifteen years ago, Bloomberg offered good-quality LCD screens with integrated mounting arms for 2 or 4, at a time when that was a pretty high-end setup. As LCD screens became cheap and ubiquitous, many users don't have the Bloomberg ones, but they still have the Bloomberg keyboard. It's useful because it has special labels for a few hotkeys, plus some of them have extras like fingerprint readers. If you lack the special keyboard you can press Alt+K on any keyboard and the terminal will show you a graphic of the special keys for reference.
But to really understand why they have a special keyboard, you need to look back a good long while. That's covered here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-blo... - the gist is that a "Bloomberg terminal" used to be a real terminal, connected to a magic box on the customer premises (which served several terminals). There have been many, many iterations of the terminal hardware, from a dedicated proprietary box, to software running on Sparc workstations, to software running on Windows, with the keyboard becoming more like a PC keyboard around the turn of the century.
> is it a VPN
No. Traditionally, customers connect their terminals back to the Bloomberg service via leased lines (i.e. not the internet). But for many years now you have the option of using the internet, though not everyone wants that.
> The cost of the product is ridiculous.
The cost of the product is much less than what some customers would be willing to pay. Most customers pay about the same monthly fee, regardless of where they are in the world, regardless of their corporate income statement, etc. So yes, it seems expensive to people who wouldn't get that much out of it. Some schools get a discount.
> Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware?
Bloomberg does not require specialized hardware at all. You can install it on any Windows laptop, and you are more than welcome to do so. As for cheaper--yes, there are lots of things which are cheaper, but you will be hard-pressed to find any combination of those which is still cheaper and yet does most of what Bloomberg does (i.e. has similar quantity and quality of data, and applications built up).
> I know Bloomberg is a politician
He is now, but he was not when his company went from 0 users to 100,000 users.
[0] https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c...
Paul Graham once wrote that "information wants to be free", and that there are very few areas in which you can make a significant revenue by selling information, financial information being the exception.
$6B ($9b) seems to be the upper bound of revenue for an information product (company). And Bloomberg has unusually wide moat.
Actually turns out the original quote attributed to Brand is not quite right. There is a qualifier ("Information almost wants to be free"), but that qualifier dropped off along the way.
See http://www.digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be...
$ apt install wallstreet
$ wallstreet
I created that for Ubuntu, as a follow-on to:
$ apt install hollywood
$ hollywood
Purely for fun. Try it!
"fill your console with Wall Street-like news and stats"
[Tried to "apt show" it, I'm not on zesty.]
I suppose at the end of the day even though they do all this I'm not 100% sure they do it very well. I don't use the terminal or claim to know how, but it seems to have have become an essential tool for many people in the finance industry.
Although after all that I know there is a joke going around that the main reason most people fork out for the terminal is for the chat functionality.
Data brokers. Not a regular thing in comp.sci, but very much so in the world of finance.
Pulls up a global map with "near-realtime" locations of cargo ships, offshore oil derricks and wind farms, tropical depressions and hurricanes, uranium mines, all kinds of crazy stuff.
You can zoom in on the Panama Canal and see which oil tankers under whose flag are waiting in line to pass through, where they're going and how much oil they're carrying.
You can sort the world's ocean-going cargo vessels by commodity, to see where all the orange juice is."
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloo...