
Twilight Of The Terminal: The Disruption Of Bloomberg L.P - anonu
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/bloomberg-terminal-disruption/
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rdlecler1
Definetly a self serving piece as CB Insights seed themeselves as one of those
long tail disrupters, but ironically they’re also struggling with the long
tail. Their domain specific data on at least foodtech and agtech is poor at
best and corp executives have told me they were burned by their subscription
services which over promised and under delivered. BT May be expensive but it’s
a religion for many in finance—-like google or a second internet. It’s not
easy to replace.

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mlevental
I don't understand why transparent "content marketing" like this gets upvoted
on hn. isn't the audience here savvy enough to recognize it for what it is? a
company trying to exaggerate its value prop.

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anonu
Generally, I'm in agreement with you guys on your views on CB Insights. But
did you actually read this piece? This one happens to be well written:
provides decent historical context and lays out the current landscape pretty
well. I do think the author overhypes the disruption thesis. Bbg is still a
fortress and it will take a decade or more to create viable alternatives to
the terminal...

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dm3
I think the reason for the decline is simple - the number of professional
users is shrinking. Large banks have shrunk their trading desks and the number
of independent shops is shrinking too [1]. Couple that with the increased
weight of quantitative strategies, which need a market data provider rather
than a terminal, and you can see why the Bloomberg Terminal is in decline.

[1]: [https://www.valuewalk.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/Biggest...](https://www.valuewalk.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/Biggest-Hedge-Fund-Launches-Of-2018-2.jpg)

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apaprocki
Bloomberg is a market data provider, so it doesn’t really matter if someone
wants the Terminal vs a data feed — we can sell them either.

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nodesocket
UCF has a really nice one hour intro video tutorial[1] on using the Bloomberg
Terminal. It really is crazy powerful, but has a high learning curve. It is
however the defacto standard for professional traders and finance. I'd often
thought would it be feasible to come out with a competing product that is iPad
native and offered as SaaS ($99/mo per user) with no special hardware, annual
contracts, and high costs.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE)

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a_imho
_defacto standard for professional traders and finance_

What do professional traders do nowadays? My impression was it is already bots
talking to bots and/or index funds outperforming/on par with actively managed
funds.

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MagnumOpus
True-ish in the small parts of the markets that are extremely liquid (top 500
global stocks, us treasury bond futures).

Very untrue for the vast amounts that aren't -- ten thousands of different
corporate and government bonds, thousands of leveraged loans, more fancy
securities like convertible bonds, credit default swaps or contingent-
convertible bank bonds get traded over Bloomberg chatrooms (think Whatsapp
groups with lots of additional features but lots of regulatory red tape).

In these markets passive funds underperform active funds by vastly more than
the fee differential - and that is not coincidental.

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nikanj
When you go to a construction site, the workers are not carrying around tools
from the Fisher Price My First Hammer kit.

Professional tools are unwieldy, hard to use correctly, and ridiculously
efficient compared to the beginner-friendly versions.

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jdavis703
This is about pros realizing they don't need hammers anymore. To extend the
construction analogy, it's as if the construction workers started building
pre-fabricated components in factories and only snapped together the pieces on
site.

According to the article sophisticated algorithms, rising use of quants and
high frequency trading are leveraging data sources directly -- there's no need
for a professional at a terminal anymore when you can essentially leverage IT
to do the day-to-day trading.

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ardy42
> Very few Bloomberg Terminal users use more than a “small percentage” of the
> thousands of functions available through it, according to Fortune.

This is proof that the Bloomberg Terminal is a power user system.

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golergka
I've seen similar statements about many pieces of professional software. The
key point they forget to mention is that these small percentages are different
for every user.

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piokoch
Yup, second that, this was pointed out by Joel Spolsky in the context of MS
Office having so many options that are almost not used, so it should be easy
to create competing product that would cover the most popular once. The crux
of the matter is here that for each user the most popular feature set is
different.

Bloomberg has also one more advantage: tones of historical data that are
potentially difficult to find and aggregate.

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FundThrowaway
Our Bloomberg usage these days is pretty much entirely the chat. I think the
only other feature that gets regular use is the excel plugins.

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stubborn_d0nkey
> More than 320,000 people around the world — mainly traders, analysts, and
> brokers — pay about $24,000 a year each to use the Bloomberg Terminal to
> access real-time market data, communicate with other users, get the latest
> news, pull company data, and more.

> Assuming minimal discounting, that would make the terminal a more than $7B
> business alone.

The numbers do not fit 320,000 * 24,000 is over 700B.

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romwell
>The numbers do not fit 320,000 * 24,000 is . . .

Here's a mental math flow for this estimate:

    
    
          320,000 * 24,000  
         =(320 * 24) million (let's deal with the easy zeros first)
        ~=(300 * 20) million (underestimate)
         =(600 * 10) million
         = 6 billion (very roughly).
    

Another flow:

    
    
          (320 * 24) million 
        ~=(320 * 25) million (overestimate)
         =(80 * 100) million
         =8 billion.
    

So we have a number between 6 and 8 billion, 7 sounds about right.

