
Why it’s hard to kill the Bloomberg terminal (2019) - simonebrunozzi
https://marker.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-kill-the-bloomberg-terminal-61073482e496
======
blueyes
A lot of people misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. I'm a former
terminal user. Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the
longest-lasting, social networks when it debuted in 1981. It is a social
network whose average user earns more than $400k per year. There's not as many
of those as there are Facebook users, but they have very specific needs, they
are likely to know and need to communicate with many of their peers, and _they
consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status._ Bloomberg benefits
from the ultimate network lockin. If you work in a financial firm and you
don't merit a Bloomberg Terminal, no matter how high up you are in HR, then
you're not that important to the company. All those folks are messaging each
other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and
who's out.

For those who dislike Bloomberg's UI, guess what, many people within Bloomberg
do, too. But over the decades, their users have learned how to get to their
favorite screens by navigating through a pseudo-CLI, and those users do not
want to learn something new. Anyone who has ever tried to build a tooling
company of any sort knows how hard it is to ask people to swap out one set of
tools for another. Your ideal UI for Bloomberg runs directly counter to the
deepest desires of their historical clients. Mastering the useless difficulty
of that UI, too, means you are part of the in group.

Finally, Bloomberg has set peoples' expectations across work spaces, and it
offers many financial firms a standard tooling. Trader X used a Bloomberg
Terminal at Firm Y, well, she'll get up to speed quickly with us because we
also use it.

[edited to recognize the author understands the social network side of
Bloomberg terminals, in line with comment below.]

~~~
Uehreka
What if Bloomberg made a "new UI", which you could easily toggle to/from, for
the benefit of the people who don't like the current UI? Over time the number
of people who use the current UI would become a smaller and smaller share of
their customer base, and in like, 30 years, they could turn the old UI off.

~~~
andechs
Why would they though? If their customer retention is already super high, the
only reason to make an onboarding curve more shallow would be to acquire new
users.

Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why
would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?

~~~
Uehreka
Success hides problems though. If through some unforeseen means a competitor
were to arise in 5-10 years who happened to have a better UI that works for a
wider range of people, then spending 35 years saying “They can’t choose anyone
but us! Let them eat CLI arguments!” is going to look pretty silly.

If it would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue to shore up their UI
to make it harder for a future competitor to disrupt them, that seems like a
worthy use of money.

~~~
cbzoiav
They tried it - nobody used it.

One thing people fail to realise is while not initially intuitive once you get
used to it the Bloomberg UX becomes muscle memory to instantly load (they
force all but the smallest customers onto leased lines) exactly the data you
wanted in a dense consistent (UX on any remotely popular function is reviewed
and guidelines enforced) easy to read form.

~~~
_alex_
this. bloomberg terminal is an expert friendly system. it’s not optimized for
high conversion rates and casual stickiness, it’s optimized for the
productivity of people who are willing to spend the time building the muscle
memory.

~~~
smegger001
it is the Emacs of finance.

~~~
kmonsen
You mean vi right? (I prefer emacs myself partially because I feel it’s more
noob friendly)

------
bsdz
> but the customer service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn’t do something
> you need, the company is willing to fix it or build it.

At $20k+ per annum cost I wouldn't expect anything less. That said we
Europeans have been asking for non American date format support for years but
it's a won't fix. So I guess the fee still isn't large enough.

A big complaint I have is why can't I keep the data I download off the
terminal for an exchange if I'm already paying the exchange fees in addition
to bloomberg's annual fee? It's like renting data. Also it makes it difficult
to switch to a competing product.

Another mild annoyance is the left field approach their reps have about the
tech that is visible when they make their regular visits to your office. Your
company might have invested in developing data screens ,(outside of Bloomberg)
and some months later those views mysteriously become available as new
functionality for all users. It's even worse if you use their API; eg, you
might write a private back-testing indicator specific to your market and
within a day or two it appears in their public indicator list.

~~~
luspr
European here, American date format is better.

~~~
dragonwriter
American here, and ISO is better than the common American format, though US
_military_ date style is also better than the more common American format, and
maybe better than ISO for some uses.

~~~
luspr
I mean ISO. It's lexicographically ordered. And gets more detailed / fine-
grained reading left to right. (Year-month-day). I like those features.

------
chollida1
The article doesn't mention what I think is the terminals greatest strengths.

1) Emsx, this is a network that every sell side client is on that allows you
to trade equities. This means that once 2 guys have a terminal they can trade
through anyone that will talk to them.

2) Research tools, every broker has their research setup to be received
through the terminal. Research providers can perms ion entire firms or single
individuals for their research so no in house tools are needed.

3) user profiles. When you leave your current firm for another one you can
keep your bloomberg profile(models, settings, research entitlements, etc).
Given how often people move around between firms this makes the terminal very
sticky. Without being able to keep your profile and data people would be far
less likely to invest in using the terminal

4) They have "compliance tools" that every financial firm is required to have
by law.

Need email,IB conversation, even slack archived? They have BVault.

Need real time monitoring of employee chats? They can do that

MIFD 2 regulations? They can help you manage your research to stay compliant.

Need basic portfolio risk reports run? They have PORT<GO> to make compliance
happy.

------
andrewstuart
Around 1990 I worked for a company called equinet that was basically the
"Bloomberg of Australia".

At the time, the Australian stock exchange (ASX) ran its own sharemarket
information service called "Jecnet". It was serial dumb terminals connected
over phone lines back to an HP minicomputer/mainframe in Sydney. It was
extremely popular amongst professional trading houses and institutional
investors.

And the stock exchange decided to get out of the market providing information
services, so they announced they were shutting down Jecnet.

So all the stockbrokers and institutional investors around Australia who used
Jecnet - and there were alot - were going to lose their service. They would
all be forced to move to a new system, away from the one they knew well.

And this guy turned up at equinet - I think he had previously worked for the
ASX.

What he had done, is written a DOS Modula2 application which was:

\-- a little server application which ran on an 80486DX2

\-- it listened on a serial port to the ASX price feed which came in at
9600BPS

\-- it had a serial controller card installed with 16 serial ports attached

\-- it cached the ASX price feed

And here's the kicker - it pretty much exactly replicated the Jecnet
functionality and user interface. (that's my recollection anyway)

So what this guy had done is effectively replace the HP minicomputer with a
drop in distributed async server that cloned Jecnet.

So equinet bought/licensed this from him and went to all those Jecnet terminal
subscribers and said "you don't need to lose Jecnet, we'll just switch the
serial connection from the ASX to us". Brilliant success.

And in time many of those terminal users were transitioned to the much more
powerful equinet Windows sharemarket information system.

But it was incredible at the time to see this guy essentially replace the
entire functionality of the HP minicomputer system with this thing written to
run on a 486.

~~~
exikyut
That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS)).

Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?

~~~
andrewstuart
>> Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?

What history are you interested in? I don't think anyone would have written
anything about equinet - it was alot of fun to work at - a true technology
startup before startups were called startups. Founded by a visionary genius
called Peter Dunai. equinet wrote what must have been some of the very first
Windows applications. I joined the company in 1987 and they had already
written equinet for Windows then so it must have been Windows 1 or Windows 2.
Peter Dunai backed Windows when the rest of the industry was still thinking
the future was OS/2\. Some of the smartest programmers I've ever met worked
there.

equinet eventually merged with Bridge Information Systems - an American
company. Or maybe it was Knight Ridder. Can't quite remember. The founder of
equinet went on to found Iress which became the largest sharemarket
information systems company in Australia and spread internationally.

The guy who wrote the software described above was John Cameron - a really
nice guy who appears to have gone on to be extremely successful in financial
trading software.
[http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron](http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron)

>>That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS)).

It was just a straight MSDOS application. I can't recall which flavor of
Modula2 he wrote it with.

It must have been some pretty tight coding though because it had to run its
end user application code and service the serial terminals and not miss
inbound characters on a serial port.

~~~
exikyut
Thanks for replying, and for the overview!

It sounds like the early environment had that developer/engineer-driven
quality to it that makes building awesome tech rewarding, and that the
operations were managed by competence that was able to sustain that virtuous
cycle. Both incredibly rare finds (particularly nowadays....)

 _Wow_ , Googling Equinet returns 92 results (hehe probably 94 in a day or so
;) ). I thought I'd heard of them before. IRESS is very interesting, TIL about
that.

I get the impression Mr Cameron knew what was happening with Jecnet, knew he
could replace it, knew that the result would very successfully be
bought/licensed, and went to down... very nice. (Just turned up
[https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-
jecnet...](https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet-in-
sight-19890908-k3kiw), possibly not directly relevant)

Regarding QDOS->MS-DOS, apologies for the unclarified obscurity: QDOS, or
86-DOS, was sold for $50k to Microsoft, which turned the product into MS-DOS
and made the company. The Equinet situation sounded similar to the MS-
DOS/Microsoft success. (Until two paragraphs ago I thought Equinet was still a
still-extant major company; I think my brain might've been conflating
"Equifax" and something else ending in "-net", or maybe my brain just filed
the name away a very long time ago)

I do agree that not dropping characters from 16 users (plus a firehose) was
pretty impressive on a... 25MHz? 33MHz? 486DX2. (Haha, how much RAM did it
have...) I'm not too familiar with Modula-2 but poking around a couple of PDFs
of different Modula-2 systems suggested they supported ISRs (interrupt service
routines), so perhaps those were used for character buffering. (Or, likely,
_had_ to be used.) Now I'm idly curious: sure, the serial link was 9600 baud,
but how fast did the feed run? 500b/s? 1KB/s? 100 lines/sec? (It would be
interesting to know the average data rate of a major stock ticker in 1990!)
Chances are this is a bit tricky to answer nowadays.

As an aside, it would be very neat if those early pre-Win3.x versions of
Equinet for Windows were to ever fall off the back of a truck. They'd probably
be as unusable as CompuServe clients, but still interesting from a historical
standpoint, especially if they launch at all (there are people digging
Win1.x/2.x-era apps off of floppy disks (and frequenting sites like
winworldpc.com and vogons.org), and while I only poke around occasionally I've
never seen any discussion of anything like this, ever, and I presume there is
no knowledge it existed. Hence the historical interest perspective). Quite
likely it's one of those "...uhhhhhh..." sorts of things though; and maybe
others have been similarly curious before me as well.

------
lordnacho
I have a slightly broader perspective on BBG than most, I think. Firstly, I
traded across a load of asset classes. Secondly, I used the APIs to both
stream live data and download historical data.

What I seem to see in the comments is that "X is their killer app". But
actually you'll find they have loads of X, Y and Z apps. You just think that
it's X because most people are in a particular product.

The breadth is quite amazing. No matter what I was trading, BBG had a foot in
the door. Want equity analyst data? Check. Want to look at OTC bonds from
various banks? Check. CDS indices? Yep. CDS single name? Yep. Want a swaption
calculator? Yep, even got vol surfaces for that. What about FX exotics? Sure.
Just about anything I touched, BBG would have data or calculators for.
Sometimes you found the data might be a bit sparse, but they'd have some
upsell for you if you liked.

As for the APIs, there is a lot of digging if you're going to use the data for
anything. Finding out exactly how some data column is collected is hard work,
they don't make it easy to ask. You do have the upside that almost all data is
collected the same way, so you don't spend a lot of time writing several
download APIs.

There's also a lot of settings that affect the data that aren't obvious. Well
perhaps it's in the documentation somewhere but it definitely helps to have
someone around who has seen the quirks.

~~~
clausok
Speaking of this breadth, a few years ago I looked at Bloomberg's PORT suite
of portfolio performance attribution and risk management functions to see what
they offered and how programmable it was. On top of the usual extensive help
docs, they had 56 white papers totaling ~1400 pages (as of June 2017)
explaining the calculations.

------
jedberg
> what they often miss is that Bloomberg is a great business because it has
> low churn, and it has low churn because its IM function is basically an
> exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they
> are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary.

This is the key insight. They create exclusivity through their high price.

~~~
dredmorbius
And Facebook was once Literally Harvard.

------
JackFr
The article misses two major points.

The social network is not nearly as valuable as the article makes out. It is
only valuable insofar as the big banks are willing to trust you. If Societe
Generale, UBS, Merus Capital, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, BlackRock,
Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and JP Morgan all are a little
skittish about Bloomberg controlling the platform, they can go somewhere else
and tell the traders they have to use it.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging-
app-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging-app-thats-
been-a-hit-with-wall-street-raises-165m-at-a-1-4b-valuation/)

The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities. It is data
intensive, it is analytically complex and the second largest asset class, with
9 trillion outstanding, and you simply cannot trade them without a Bloomberg
terminal.

~~~
throwanem
Mortgage-backed securities seem like a bad bet right now. Unless you're
betting against them, anyway.

~~~
JackFr
There are no bad securities; only bad prices.

------
easytiger
> Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history

If you were a developer working with their API based feeds you wouldn't be
saying that

~~~
scandox
> the user interface on the Bloomberg Terminal isn’t great, but the customer
> service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn’t do something you need, the
> company is willing to fix it or build it.

In other words the best from the customer's perspective.

~~~
pantaloony
So far as UI quality goes, I put stability (rarely changes) and
consistency/predictability (clicking this may take a bit without feedback that
anything’s happening, which isn’t great, but it _always_ gives a result, even
if it’s just an error, so long as the button made its little “I’ve been
clicked” animation, and if it didn’t do that, the click 100% for sure did not
register) over everything else. IDK if this product has those qualities, but
I’d take those over something the devs/UX/designers are always fiddling with
in the name of “usability” any day.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
It’s largely keyboard driven. There is very little fluff. The keybindings and
UI haven’t changed for decades.

I loved it, and I’m on the younger side of finance workers. It looks serious
and feels serious and is blazing fast.

If someone “modernised” the UI, they’d likely lose their multi-millionaire
customers who appear just to have it for vanity’s sake. The UX is a gating
mechanism that enhances the network’s value.

~~~
dogfoods
So vim but for finance?

~~~
arrow7000
I love this

------
627467
I think this is only surprising for some people because the tech growth-
adoption mentality of the last couple of decades needed and benefited from UI
that became increasingly optimized for 'ease of use', for 'everyone', for
universality.

But bloomberg terminals do not need to be massively adopted. You don't need
more (less specialized) terminal operators. That market/user-base didn't need
to grow as much as excel users, browser user or CRM users.

As we reach peak digital tools/process adoptions I expect more and more
specialized tools that don't try to be 'easy to use' first.

------
tdeck
In looking for more screenshots I found this amusingly blunt article:

[https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-
makeover](https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover)

> Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most
> users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating
> Bloomberg's current "complex" interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI
> flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely
> transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a
> hard-core professional.

------
taude
Relevant to the conversation here are all the old comments on Hacker News
about prior articles on the Bloomberg terminal, like "Ask HN: What's so great
about the Bloomberg Terminal" [1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736009)

------
lefstathiou
My company effectively (yet loosely) competes with BBG in a small
insignificant corner of the fixed income universe (asset backed securities).

My observations:

1- BBG is now part of a banks (and most large trading firms) infrastructure.
BBG vCons are the standard way to confirm trades, its chat is one of three
tools approved by banks, it has all the APIs to monitor every piece of
communication, etc

2- BBG has proprietary data sets no one can get or on terms no one else will
ever receive (Eg CUSIP).

3- I think that if the CUSIP license were more open and affordable, we would
see many more competitive products. Instead S&P effectively has a monopoly.
CUSIPS are the foundation of any alternative. The reality is you need many
millions to get that feed and must charge hundreds to each customer. Few can
do that

4- I think the idea of BBG as a social network is way over valued. It’s
convenient yes but if you have inventory other people want in fixed income
you’ll get the look. Every trader I know uses telephone and Outlook. It’s a
moat but not the biggest in my opinion.

5- BBG does A LOT. I believe that a given user typically uses some small
fraction of a % of functionality (like 2-3%), eg Chat + news + 2-3 pages. I
think if one were to compete against Bloomberg, one would have to focus on not
being everything (like Money.net or Eikon which isn’t working) but isolating
key verticals and building a comprehensive alternative for that space. Going
up against all tools everywhere globally feels like a fools errand.

For example, there is a site called Artemis for catastrophe bonds. Everyone
serious in that market I’m sure has a BBG terminal and yet everyone also
actively visits the site which is run by one guy.

~~~
asdfk-12
regarding 3:

Do you think that there is a possibility to transition across to ISIN, SEDOL,
VALOR, etc.? Or will we be locked into CUSIPs for the forseeable future?

regarding 5:

Would you be more specific about how Eikon 'isn't working?'

Thank you for the informative post : )

~~~
lefstathiou
Re: #3 Doubtful IMO. I personally believe that ISINs are the most viable
alternative (and far less expensive to license). The issue is that you will
have to get the industry (or perhaps just JPM/BOA/CITI in the US) to stop
quoting and executing everything with CUSIPS... I think the best fix here is a
legislative one personally. CUSIPS along with all corresponding identifying
data on a security should be public domain in my opinion.

#5 I probably shouldn’t have said that, at this point my anecdotal observation
on it is too dated. At the time I worked in banking and evaluated it for our
team it did a lot but not enough, was pretty but challenging to figure out and
everything was being “worked on”. Everyone I knew either had BBG or FactSet.

------
ElectronShak
> Dating sites, for example, are unstable because the most attractive
> prospects pair off, lowering the quality of the remaining user base until
> the site can’t recruit new users.

I chuckled at this line.

~~~
thekyle
Why? The reasoning seems fine to me.

~~~
ElectronShak
Exactly. The accuracy made me laugh.

------
twic
Bloomberg is successful because they are a monopoly supplier of valuable
information, and that's the whole story.

Their software is a shitshow, for developers and end users. Their data
curation is often lacklustre. But none of that matters.

~~~
slantaclaus
The article made it fairly clear this is not the case (i.e. a status symbol,
an exclusive social network)

------
fermienrico
If designers tried to design Bloomberg Terminal today, it would be a bloated
javascript app that takes way too fucking long, the information density would
be 1/10th of what you can fit on a screen, giant fonts, unnecessary animations
and stripe-like-polish, large buttons, scroll jacking and hiding most
important controls unless you hover the mouse over a region (read:
undiscoverable), and it would have gradients somewhere with a sticky top menu.

We've totally regressed. We've lost it. We've become enamored with aesthetics.

Btw, it would also be available as an electron app on Mac, Windows and Linux
platforms. And it will automatically update behind the scenes, who gives a
fuck about your ability to control updates for a $25k/year business critical
software.

------
fancyfredbot
There's an app called Symphony which is trying (with some success) to take
over the chat aspect from Bloomberg. Their killer feature is privacy - not
from your institution's compliance dept, but from Bloomberg. Bloomberg's
journalists could snoop traders activity on the platform. Understandably banks
and traders hate that and so have funded and pushed Symphony instead.

~~~
infinite8s
Not only that, but banks would no longer have to get BBG accounts for their
middle office to be able to communicate with clients (cutting out a huge cost
- basically a 25k/person cost for a chat app).

------
nly
Another reason is it takes months of negotiations and 5 figure $$ sums per
month to get leased lines in to the various exchange networks across the
globe. Every exchange also has its own protocol, or variation of a common
protocol, connectivity quirks, market model, data quality and normalisation
issues etc. etc. Maintaining all this is expensive.

Market data is an expensive game to get in to.

~~~
raldi
I worked for Bloomberg for five years and Twilio for four. They're very
similar in that regard.

------
bradj
A missing piece of this article is a discussion of Bloomberg’s more or less
successful competitors today: Refinitiv, Factset, Alphasense, CapIQ, Tradeweb,
MarketAxxess, Enverus

------
haecceity
What is a Bloomberg terminal made of? A windows exe and a keyboard? I thought
it was the whole machine?

~~~
jshaqaw
Bloomberg terminal is no longer a physical thing (except for a custom keyboard
with integrated fingerprint reader and function keys) and runs on generic
Windows.

------
antb123
Worked with Bloomberg for years. Its not a software company. That is like
calling the DTC or NYSE a software company.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_Corporation)

1) Its a bit of a cult with its crazy NYC main office

2) Culture is very sales driven (a bit like Oracle) and up or out hiring
policies. Smart pricing - like MS Office. They know who and how to charge (for
example giving free FIX connections etc). I once had a rep break down crying
asking for another terminal subscription otherwise she was going to be fired.

3) The terminal is a bit like vim. Once you memorize the keystrokes you can do
anything.

4) Cool biometric 2FA technology with the card

5) A lot of what they have is done better by other companies except the sales
and the bundling.

------
anonu
Bloomberg moats: chat, media (breaking news, economic announcements with low
latency), Excel and API integrations, UI buy-in (whereby a terrible interface
with a moderately steep learning curve becomes the reason people enjoy it)

------
decafninja
So I once interviewed at Bloomberg for a frontend engineer role that I believe
would have involved working with the BB terminal UI.

During the interview, I was told that the modern UI development was done in
JavaScript using a proprietary framework. Found that interesting to say the
least.

I got rejected because I couldn't do some fancy binary tree algorithm trick,
but I walked out of the interview thinking I didn't want the job anyways as I
am not fond of proprietary frameworks (short of working at a FAANG level
company anyways... I would consider BB highly prestigious, but still not at
that level...)

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Bloomberg did a milkround at my university about 10 years ago - showing off
their new terminal. I noticed it looked like it was running on Windows with
their terminal GUI implemented using standard Win32 hWnds and GDI painting
(you can tell by how text and shapes are rendered - and how it couldn’t seem
to smoothly animate above 30fps) - and the built-in newsviewer was playing a
video using the Windows Media Player ActiveX control.

So if they have switched to Electron - at least that will hopefully deliver a
better UX - it’s not like users are meant to run other programs on those
things (I think?) so they don’t care about Chromium’s memory usage.

~~~
decafninja
I don't think it was Electron or even anything based on Chromium - I could be
wrong, my memory is fuzzy. But I think they said it was a custom
implementation that predated Electron. Don't quote me on that though.
Obviously someone that actually works there would know best.

Another financial firm I interviewed at - Tradeweb, also had something
similar. Custom implementation, not Electron, but in their case, yes Chromium.

------
jz391
This thread talks about their implementation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197197)

------
jshaqaw
For equities an Interactive brokers setup with a few hundred dollars for
additional feeds replicates 90 percent of Bloomberg functionality at 2% of the
annual expense. For fixed income you are SOL without a Bloomberg. Among other
things, good luck getting basic bond runs. And while you can build out tooling
to do fixed income analytics on your own it is cumbersome and will require a
lot of manual data gathering/input making it hard to rapidly compare
securities.

~~~
antb123
For Equities I am not sure IB supports multiple prime brokers or has as good
borrow and lend capabilities as the big brokers do. Also it doesn't have
access to institutional algos offered by the big brokers.

The big Prime desks support BB as well as Fidessa and other systems.

------
Thaxll
I'm curious, do those terminal actually plug on regular internet?

~~~
oxfordmale
Yes, it is just a regular computer running Bloomberg software. It is tightly
locked down, you can't set it up to remote desktop into one.

~~~
zelly
Why not? How can it tell if you're remoteing? I though I've seen people use
Bloomberg software over RDP and AWS Workspaces on Windows.

~~~
oxfordmale
Bloomberg did regularly audit our Open Terminal. If you fall foul of their
license agreement, you will have to pay up.

------
rudolph9
One thing I didn’t see anyone mention is availability of data. We used
Bloomberg terminal subscriptions and eventually paid of B-Pipe to integrate
into our real-time pricing despite the api being absolutely horrendous and
costing nearly $100k/month it was still our cheapest option given we would
have to integrate with multiple other providers at lower but really high rates
that added up to cost greater than b-pipe.

Financial data is kind of a racket.

------
eddyg
Have their been any open source attempts to make a Bloomberg Terminal-like
tool using freely available APIs (such as
[https://iexcloud.io](https://iexcloud.io)) and/or scraped data sources? It
wouldn't have to be "real-time", but I think it could be interesting to have a
similarly-styled, keyboard-centric "Finance & News" dashboard.

------
XnoiVeX
There is a lot of trading chatter on Discord. Predominantly the younger and
more tech savvy investors (or should I call them traders?).

~~~
hmate9
They are also much lower in quality than conversations in Bloomberg.

------
chirau
How is Eikon doing?

~~~
SanchoPanda
It's just so slow, and things that I was able to figure out using Bloomberg's
autocomplete I'm regularly at a loss for using Eikon.

The transition of the fundamental data towards being refinitiv branded is also
very uncomfortable.

~~~
pvitz
It is amazing how slow the data item browser in Eikon is as compared to FLDS.
Also, something as simple as HP is hidden in the chart view in Eikon...

------
markus_zhang
Back in the days I wish I could afford one, just to read news for fun, but
alas it is too expensive for personal enjoyment.

~~~
akhilcacharya
My local public library has one, you might be able to find access through a
community college.

~~~
divbzero
Which municipality?

New York Public Library provides access at their Business Center [1] curious
if other public libraries have something similar.

[1]: [https://www.nypl.org/collections/articles-
databases/bloomber...](https://www.nypl.org/collections/articles-
databases/bloomberg)

~~~
akhilcacharya
The Boston Public Library does.

------
ShabbosGoy
What does a decentralized Bloomberg terminal look like?

------
the_watcher
I was hoping this would be by Byrne Hobart! If you haven't checked it out, he
writes daily at diff.substack.com and is up there with Ben Thompson and Matt
Levine in terms of quality.

------
parliament32
A Bloomberg for crypto would make a killing.

~~~
chollida1
They have the command CRYP<GO>.

You can query real time feeds for instruments like BTC, ETH and LTC.

They have consolidated data feeds from about 8 exchanges.

------
GekkePrutser
I never ever even heard of this one :) The article doesn't really explain what
it is, but it sounds like a super expensive IM for financial elites?

But I don't work in the financial sector. I'd never want to either. But
interesting to know it exists.

PS: A CLI/Curses interface sounds amazing to me though! :D

~~~
smabie
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE&t=1478s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE&t=1478s).

It's a terminal for access to market data and also has chat integrated into
it. You can also trade on it if you want.

------
paulpauper
$25k/year to be among an elite community of traders and investors even though
the experts struggle to beat the market. Does not sound so good. You can get
all the other stuff for free using thinkorswim and other services. Anything
Bloomberg provides can be done for free or with much cheaper services.
Reddit's Wallstreetbets is free to join and it seems people there have a knack
for beating the market and knowing what to buy before it becomes really big.
They have been bullish on tesla and amazon for a long time. Like any
community, part of the challenge is filtering out the noise from the signal.

~~~
ladberg
People on r/wallstreetbets don't have a knack for it, that's just what they
want you to think. If you took gave 1000 monkeys RobinHood and let them trade
whatever they wanted, a few would be incredibly successful for a few days.

On r/wallstreetbets, you're only seeing the few who are randomly successful
for short amounts of time because they are upvoted and the rest are lost in
the crowd.

~~~
paulpauper
Whether or not skill exists in the context of investing and trading is a hotly
debated topic in economics and finance. Some say it does not exist after
adjusting for various factors. I think there are some individuals (such as Jim
Simons) who demonstrate skill that cannot be explained-away by chance alone.
By following such individuals, you can possibly gain an edge.

>On r/wallstreetbets, you're only seeing the few who are randomly successful
for short amounts of time because they are upvoted and the rest are lost in
the crowd.

That may be true but that does not mean there isn't a pattern. if they are all
making fortunes with Tesla and Amazon, maybe that is an indication to be long
Tesla and Amazon, although not necessarily with risky options though. Just
buying the stock is fine. The monkey analogy implies no pattern.

