
The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained - yarapavan
https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2019/12/11/21005008/michael-bloomberg-terminal-net-worth-2020
======
dtrailin
Having worked at Bloomberg I really wish there was more content published
about how it's implemented because it pretty astonishing in both good and bad
ways. For one thing the codebase is ancient there are still some Fortran bits
that in use today. However the more modern code is in C/C++ and designed
heavily with latency in mind. In particular the feeds are designed to be
extremely fast with a few custom built high performance databases built to
serve this [0].

The bit that really amazed me was the way the front end is implemented. The
front-end is fully rendered server side (meaning every click requires a full
round trip to Bloombergs servers) in Javascript using spidermonkey. This
caused a lot of difficulties since any real time elements needed to be
rendered in a totally different way. As well the version of Javascript was
restricted from using things like timers or callbacks since that could make
rendering stall. In some ways it's impressive that they were doing server side
Javascript at least 5 years before nodeJS but whole approach seems like a
byproduct of age of mainframes.

[0]
[https://bloomberg.github.io/comdb2/overview_home.html](https://bloomberg.github.io/comdb2/overview_home.html)

~~~
wtetzner
What was the reason for using Javascript to do the server-side rendering (as
opposed to another language on the server)? Was it just a preference, or were
there some technical reasons?

~~~
apaprocki
There were reasons for wanting to use an embedded scripting language in
general. Ultimately the choice (at the time) came down to either Lua or
JavaScript. There were pros/cons to each approach and in the end JavaScript
was chosen mainly because many coming in from the outside would already be
familiar with it. Keep in mind that this was before Chrome existed and browser
wars had not begun yet... so things were a bit rocky at first, but really it's
peen proven to be the right path. Eich's common line -- "Always bet on JS" and
all :)

------
xerox13ster
I had to reinstall one of these after one of the top trading brass in oil
futures at Wal-mart got affected by those fake Microsoft Support scammers and
they put the boot lock on his computer.

It's a pain to set up, but it's authentication is unbelievable. It has
something like triple factor authentication plus biometrics.

To get him logged in to test it so I could make sure it spread across his 5
monitors correctly, I had to use his RSA key + password to log in to the
website, then use a physical device that reads flashes on the screen to
generate another code with another password, before he finally put in another
password and scanned his fingerprint on the keyboard.

It was mind-boggling, but not unexpected given this dude was moving millions
every day.

~~~
sbolt
Off topic but I'm curious why Walmart employs futures traders?

~~~
phdp
I imagine that, just like airlines use futures to hedge the price risk of jet
fuel, they do the same for their vast logistics operation. They can lock in
prices so they aren’t suddenly facing a massive bill if gas goes way up.

~~~
formercoder
Interestingly airlines are divided on hedging and not all participate in it
[https://www.eurofinance.com/news/airlines-divided-on-
hedge-b...](https://www.eurofinance.com/news/airlines-divided-on-hedge-
benefits-as-oil-volatility-surges/)

~~~
joosters
Hedging is extremely odd in that while it is thought of as a way to lock in
'certainty' on the price of something, it really is just another way of
gambling on a price.

In the case of airlines, they are effectively 'short' oil, in that they profit
if the price of oil falls, and lose if the price rises. So the usual story is
that it makes sense to hedge their oil costs. They can do this in three main
ways:

1) Buy oil forward. They get to lock in the price of oil at a future time. If
oil prices rise, they win. But if oil prices fall, they lose out, since
competitors can now buy oil more cheaply.

2) Buy a call option on oil. They get the right to buy oil at a fixed price at
a future time. If oil prices rise, they can exercise the option, and win. If
oil prices fall, they can just take the cheaper price => another win. But the
option itself has a cost, so if oil prices don't change much, they lose out
since they had to eat the cost of buying the option.

3) Sell a put option on oil. This is the airline being paid by someone for the
option to sell them oil at a fixed price at a future time. In this case, the
airline wins if oil prices don't move too much in any direction (since they
get paid for the put option). If oil falls in price, they will have to buy it
at the higher price => they lose. If the oil price rises, they also lose since
the costs have risen.

Yet, in all cases, after hedging, the airline will still either win or lose
depending upon the change in oil price. _No certainty has been gained._

The choice whether to hedge or not is really down to game theory. What matters
is not just whether/how your airline hedges, but what your competitors do.

~~~
elemeno
> Yet, in all cases, after hedging, the airline will still either win or lose
> depending upon the change in oil price. No certainty has been gained.

That’s not really true. You’re locking in the price that you’re going to pay -
that’s the certainty. You might however not be getting the best price at that
point in time. From a financial forecasting perspective it probably worthwhile
trade off though as you’re fixing one of your costs for that time period and
that’s useful even when sub optimal.

~~~
joosters
There's still no certainty. For an airline, your prices have to be
competitive. If you've locked in an oil price, and it turns out to be a high
one, then your fares will be more expensive than your competitors (assuming
that they didn't hedge in the same way). So the only certainty there is
failure.

In all situations, hedging and non hedging, the oil price will determine
whether you win or lose. There is no magical combination of derivatives that
will ensure success. In fact, for every financial product you buy, you're
paying a cost due to the margin that the bank/market charged you.

Hedging might make sense for some accounting/tax situations, but that's
another issue entirely.

~~~
fennecfoxen
"If you've locked in an oil price, and it turns out to be a high one, then
your fares will be more expensive than your competitors."

No. Your fares will remain competitive. It's just a hit to your profits.

~~~
joosters
You are free to lose money by keeping the prices competitive, or lose money by
raising your prices and losing business. Either way, it's the same result.

------
rbinv
The actual title is "How Mike Bloomberg made his billions: a computer system
you’ve probably never seen", which much more closely describes the actual
article (as there's not that much detail about the terminal itself).

~~~
vxNsr
Wait is the point of this article to give Bloomberg some positive press and
make him seem technical?

~~~
apaprocki
I don’t know anything about the article, but he has an EE degree from Johns
Hopkins, so he doesn’t need to _seem_ technical.

------
sparsely
The terminal, and particularly the business model around it, is widely
disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of
power as the only high quality source for certain types of data, and they tie
it to the terminal. There are all sorts of contractual requirements around
data not leaving the machine the terminal.

It's not uncommon to hear stories about small trading shops or asset managers
having a shared terminals which they run over to do specific actions, or a
substantial amount of effort being put into automated data extraction which
avoids Bloomberg's controls.

~~~
TuringNYC
>> widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible
amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data

I agree the terminals are disdained, but I never understood this. The rest of
your comment justifies the value. They provide great data (which they spend a
boatload of money to get/clean) and they sell it. Customers don't have to buy
it, they can try to get the data themselves.

I used a BB terminal extensively for over a decade. It saved me orders of
magnitude in work, there is no way I could have obtained all this data myself
on an ongoing basis and had it available easily via API. They make a lot of
money, and they deserve it.

I had colleagues try to switch to Reuters terminals and they came ashamedly
back to Bloomberg, hat in hand.

~~~
smacktoward
The complaint seems pretty straightforward to me. As you note, the value
Bloomberg provides is all in its data and software, not in the physical
terminal itself. The terminal is effectively just DRM, a giant dongle you have
to use to access the data and services.

Back in the day you could make an argument for the value of locking services
to a proprietary terminal, since most people didn't have a computer on their
desk and all and there were no common standards for those that did. But these
days there _is_ a ubiquitously accessible common standard for desktop
information systems: the x86-based PC running Microsoft Windows. Having to use
a proprietary terminal means not being able to use all the knowledge of that
standard platform the user has built up over the years, and having to build up
a new stock of knowledge about the baroque weirdnesses of that proprietary
terminal. So I can totally see how someone would wish they could just access
that highly valuable data and software on the machine they already know how to
use.

~~~
TuringNYC
Much of the data is already accessible from almost any client that can run the
BBDL (Bloomberg Data License API, or whatever the name du jour is) Many
software vendors embed BBDL pulls using the API. For example, SunGard Front
Arena and PolyPaths both pull rates/prices/SMFs/curves seamlessly from BBDL
regardless of whether you are running on the terminal or not. This has been
the case for over a decade at least.

As for the individual software being available on different machines, they
have a solution for some of that (Bloomberg BVAL Pricing Service, or the name
du jour).

Ultimately, they want a vertically integrated UX where the models and screens
have a very intuitive correlate on their proprietary keyboard (oh, and DRM.)
It is a choice, you cant fault them for choosing that route.

There are plenty of competitors who have come along (and died) trying to offer
something else. Everyone is free to choose those.

It is a bit like Apple and iOS. I once went to Android for 2yrs, and then came
back to iOS because I saw the value of things just working well together.

------
Tenoke
After reading threads like these[1]. I can't help but feel that MOST
interfaces should indeed be like the bloomberg terminal - great example of
security-focused, minimal latency and maximum functionality product.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417)

~~~
gallerdude
Disagree. For power-users, maybe, but the average person cares about
simplicity and accessibility. The mean Facebook user doesn't care about
latency.

~~~
naikrovek
> The mean Facebook user doesn't care about latency.

They do, they just don't know it, yet. If you showed them two versions of
Facebook, one which was their normal latent mess, and one which had half the
latency, they'll take the less-latent version every single time.

Don't assume that people don't care - they definitely do, they just don't have
a choice.

------
pp19dd
And not a mention of the Bloomberg Terminal spying scandal using privileged
information. NY Post broke the story in 2013:
[https://nypost.com/2013/05/10/goldman-outs-bloomberg-
snoops/](https://nypost.com/2013/05/10/goldman-outs-bloomberg-snoops/)

"a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had
recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his
Bloomberg terminal in some time"

This is basically access to analytics. From a now-missing huffpo piece:
"reporters were able to access a few different kinds of data that are not
available to other terminal users. These included the ability to see how often
customers had logged onto terminals and the ability to track some of their
activities. They could see how many times in a month a client had entered
specific commands on a terminal to, for example, look at information about
foreign currencies or pull up economic indicators."

And why: "With these tools, Bloomberg reporters could keep loose tabs on
terminal users, which include government officials and high-profile investors
and traders. Though the tools were limited, they were potentially useful
enough to give reporters leads to news scoops — the ultimate goal at an
organization that prides itself on its news-breaking abilities."

~~~
H8crilA
It is mentioned in the article.

> _There’s also a discomfort about just how much information and data
> Bloomberg has through the terminals. In 2013, Bloomberg News reporters were
> caught using the terminal to get subscribers’ information and monitor when
> they logged in and what they were using it for. Bloomberg admitted that it
> was commonplace for reporters to have access to “limited client
> information,” apologized, and said it had changed its system._

~~~
pp19dd
"Discomfort."

That's not inaccurate, but it minimizes the impact of this scandal. It's not
as if this was just a couple of bad apples who got caught. The reality is more
ethically questionable.

Follow-up by the Atlantic: "reporters at the company were for years not only
permitted, but frequently and forcefully encouraged, to monitor Blomberg's
terminal customers for news" ; "... he used the function to surreptitiously
track the movements of the CEO of Fiat as he traveled across the United
States."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/bloombe...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/bloombergs-
terminal-snooping-more-widespread-wall-street-thought/314236/)

Terminal customers also included news agencies, their competitors.

------
tptacek
Everything I've ever read about BB terminals make them sound like Dwarf
Fortress for Finance.

------
jessriedel
Pretty light on actual details about the terminal. Anyone recommend something
more in depth?

~~~
swyx
was a trader for years before becoming a developer. AMA.

~~~
closeparen
If all the institutions are inputting trades on their Bloomberg terminals,
does that mean Bloomberg is actually executing their trades, making margin
loans, etc? Or is just just a standardized interface to other firms?

What about when traders IM each other? How does that actually become a trade?
Does someone at the bank read their chat history looking for agreements to
buy/sell and do the actual paperwork later?

~~~
swyx
> does that mean Bloomberg is actually executing their trades, making margin
> loans, etc? Or is just just a standardized interface to other firms?

good question! often its a standardized interface to other firms, a "middle
office" that is usually at your broker (if you're a fledgling shop) or in your
own offices (if you're a bank or a bigger more established fund). yes, this
means you use bloomberg as a standardized interface _to your own firm_. This
still makes sense because its such an industry standard, and has good
compliance recordkeeping. I'm sure Bloomberg could execute your trades, I've
just personally never come across or met anyone that has needed that so I'd
probably say that is a minority of situations. Come to think of it, I'm not
sure why Bloomberg doesn't also own this market. its very standard, boring
stuff.

making margin is a whole nother ball game. that's more of broker-dealer
territory. again Bloomberg is so big probably some part of it does that kind
of thing, but far more common you're getting that sort of thing from a broker-
dealer.

> What about when traders IM each other? How does that actually become a
> trade? Does someone at the bank read their chat history looking for
> agreements to buy/sell and do the actual paperwork later?

often, yes actually. someone in the middle office looks thru your chat
transcript to confirm the trades (sending paperwork over to their
counterparts, making sure it's within appropriate limits and placed in the
right risk accounts etc). for more standard deals you might have a STP
(straight through processing system) automatically pick it up from chat (with
ofc a confirmation step). i have no idea when this started, it was before my
time, but this definitely predates bloomberg itself. As a currency trader at a
bank we had these old ass machines (i forget their name, oops, i loved them)
where you had a direct line to all other banks and could "call out" to them to
deal over chat. because of the sensitive nature of these transactions (you
could be dealing in billions of notional amounts), one unique nature of these
chats was that they were immutable: no backspace, no edit button. this means
we needed a convention to recover from typos. this often worked out as
spamming EEEEE after a mistake, e.g. "Hi I buy 200 EUR at 45EEEEEE43 pls thx".
Sometimes flagrant mistakes aren't caught either, so there's a sort of
gentleman's agreement thing if you spot your counterpart making a mistake in
your favor, you ask them if they're sure or to double check, and if they're
sure then you take the deal.

kinda rickety, but it worked. this is how much of institutional block trading
is still done today* , but ofc more and more is taken over by bots.

*caveat that i'm about 4 years out of the business now

------
fn42
I was at a financial startup ~ 2012 and remember getting a couple of these to
play with. They came in the form of 1U servers (HP I think) running RHEL5 that
each needed a public IP that was open to bloomberg. I think the client app was
windows only at that time, I wonder how much has changed

~~~
zmk_
I do not think it runs on anything but windows, but you can install the
terminal software on any Windows computer you want. They are now selling
"Anywhere" subscriptions that basically let you move from one machine to
another.

~~~
akhilcacharya
It does not, but you can use a Citrix Receiver client to RDP into an hosted
instance.

------
rootbear
I am increasingly seeing "software" used as a discrete noun, rather than as a
continuous noun or an adjective, as in this line from the article:

"The terminal — a software officially named Bloomberg Professional — is still
a major part of Bloomberg’s overall business [...]"

I know languages grow and change, but this really grinds on my ears. Not so
long ago, the author would have written "a program", or "a software program",
or "an application". I see no value in the change.

~~~
aetimmes
In the HPC world, programs are sometimes referred to as 'codes'. Everyone's
nomenclature is a little different.

------
moomin
I’d really quite like to read an article about the actual architecture of the
terminal software. It’s a phenomenal piece of work that operates under some
absolutely brain-bending constraints.

------
CodeSheikh
"You’re not going to win the Super Bowl if you aren’t even playing in the
right stadium." Terrible analogy.

------
monkeydust
The terminal has been so successful largely because of timing and damn good
execution. Mike was at the right place at the right time with changes around
the financial industry and move to digitization to capture the uplift these
brought to the product it has become. It created cloud computing and social
network before those terms were officially defined.

Its distribution is such that any new startup hedge fund for example has to
have one to be taken seriously by its investors and to deal effectively with
brokers.

Other firms continue to try to beat it and in some sectors for certain
functions they have but no one really has hurt it in its entirety... Thompson
Reuters now Refinitiv has had best shot but honestly it's barley left a dent.

------
everling
I use the terminal in my work. I’ve come to loathe the obtuse UX - every
function like PORT or EMSX has its own peculiar design that has to be learned
by trial and error. A button named ”cancel” might be placed in a way that
would imply closing a window but in reality cancels a trade. The archaic
design is a trademark in its own right, so it’ll be around forever it seems.

------
haileris
I've been obsessed with the Bloomberg terminal ever since I discovered my
latent love for finance a few years back. I actually got to check one out, but
didn't really get to play with it as much as I liked. One day I'll be able to
afford the $14k/yr.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Can anybody get one as long as they can afford the subscription?

~~~
isaachier
Having worked there, I believe the answer is yes, assuming you aren't living
in a country that has an economic sanction against it, etc.

------
lordnacho
I used a Bloomberg terminal for years and years, both as a user and as a
coder.

\- It's quite convenient for business side people. I used it to trade all
sorts of things (FI, credit, equities, fx, derivs on all those) and there was
always some convenient function you could type in to give you a calculator for
whatever it was. Whatever derivatives model you found in a textbook, you could
find it in the terminal. With relevant data loaded in.

\- Data is convenient too. Once you know how to work the API, you can pull a
huge amount of data. A lot of it is available elsewhere, but nowhere has so
much in one place, in one API.

\- They are very serious about you not sharing the terminal or the data.
Obviously once you have the data in a text file, they can't do much about
that, but they do limit the amount you can download, and then they phone you
once you trigger something. Sounds like a warning, but also a sales call at
the same time.

\- It's not so easy to share the terminal itself. The standard tricks like
installing it on a VM, or installing remote desktop / VNC won't work. I'm sure
someone has figured it out, but it's not as easy as sharing most other
software services. They'd be fine with a small business sharing a terminal
though, as long as it stayed on one machine that different staff would take
turns on. And in case you thought a Bloomberg Anywhere would solve it for your
distributed team, that used to use a special biometric device. Not sure if
it's still there.

\- Chats I'm guessing are not nearly as interesting as a few years ago, before
the revelations about what was being said. I never got much gossip, but it
really depends on where you're sitting in the market. You can use them as a
replacement for voice trading, and everything is recorded. And it warns you if
you're about to send a swear word, heh.

\- A lot of small firms use the terminal to trade directly with
counterparties, there's a whole OTC infrastructure in there. I never used it
much but all the banks had their own Bloomberg pages for doing trades in all
sorts of things with them.

\- In terms of infrastructure, you can get a dedicated line for your bbg, they
come and stick some stuff into your rack. This can fail over to internet if
you want, simply a matter of changing the config on the app and phoning them.
Also IIRC you can get a special data server, depending on whether the guy
above scared you into buying one.

\- The help function is for users, not coders. You'll wait for ages while the
agent on the helpdesk figures out that he doesn't understand your problem if
you're a coder. If not he'll find the business function you're after quite
fast. Every time I got through to a dev about something that needed to be
changed, it went into a suggestions queue and stayed there.

------
dgudkov
Fun fact: Information from the Bloomberg terminal can also be received right
into Excel using special VBA functions. Although, there are licensing
restrictions on sharing such information.

------
gadders
The terminals are popular, but having worked with some of the staff at
Bloomberg to get MIFID related changes implemented, they didn't impress me at
all.

------
bilekas
I would love to be a fly on the wall in those chat rooms it facilitates..

~~~
twic
99% of it is:

    
    
      where do u see 5y5y
      size?
      20k
      2.4456/2.4511
      tx

~~~
jaflo
Explanation/translation for those of us that don't understand?

~~~
bluejay2
Person A: where do u see 5y5y = where is XYZ financial instrument trading? (in
this case, a 5y5y forward swap, I'm guessing)

B: size? = how much do you want to buy or sell?

A: 20k = $20,000

B: 2.4456/2.4511 = bid/offer = price/rate that A can sell/buy at

A: tx

~~~
twic
One amendment: 20k means dollars per basis point, rather than dollars of
notional. That is, enough notional that a 0.01% change in interest rates would
cause a $20 000 change in the net present value of the instrument. Traders
often think in these terms because it makes it much easier to compare across
different instruments.

Also, if you tried to trade 20k dollars notional, dealers would tell you to
get lost, because an amount that tiny isn't worth their time.

~~~
swyx
also known as DV01
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_duration#Dollar_duration,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_duration#Dollar_duration,_DV01,_BPV,_Bloomberg_%22Risk%22)

traded like this because it is a meaningful measure of risk regardless of
tenor. also its the same whether you're doing bonds or interest rate swaps
(or, rarer, options)

------
droitbutch
> "And while the terminal can be hard to learn — it’s not very intuitive —
> once they pick it up, a lot of people don’t want to learn a new tool and run
> the risk of making a mistake. ... The terminal is sticky."

So TLDR: it's vi for traders!

------
ken
I don't think they're quite as rare as they make it sound. It seems like half
the restaurants in NYC have one. Though I would believe that most people who
have seen one didn't realize what it is.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Why would half of restaurants in NYC need a service that costs $20k per year?

~~~
czinck
They don't need it, but their customers might. I always imagined it was like
in movies about rich people in the 80s where the waiter would interrupt the
lunch with a note on a silver platter, and they run off because Saudia Arabia
just cut oil production and oil futures are going crazy or something. But
wait! They don't have to go all the way to their office because there's a
Bloomberg right here!

"Half" is almost certainly an exaggeration, but there's probably a few places
on Wall Street that serve $200 steaks or whatever for lunch regularly that
have one. And it probably gets used only a few times a month, if at all, and
they consider it an advertising expense.

Disclaimer: I was a programmer for Bloomberg, but I never saw one in a
restaurant.

~~~
Animats
The Bank of America branch on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, near the
headquarters of the major VCs, had a public access Bloomberg terminal in the
lobby for a year. May have been a marketing demo from Bloomberg.

