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"Most [job candidates] don’t know a lot about us" That's a disgrace, as a geek I would love to put my hands on a Bloomberg Terminal! Although at $24,000 per ye

by mastazi 11y ago

"Most [job candidates] don’t know a lot about us" That's a disgrace, as a geek I would love to put my hands on a Bloomberg Terminal! Although at $24,000 per year, it won't be any time soon I guess :-)

lingben 11y ago
Most decent universities have a subscription through their econ or business schools.
Animats 11y ago
What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free. It's not that complicated. The hard part is making sense of all that numeric information. There are a number of fixed-layout screens you can pull up to follow entire markets broadly, and those come up with one or two hot-key presses. Then, there are standard analyses for individual ticker symbols. There's a news story system. There's a way to load up an Excel spreadsheet and run that, using live Bloomberg data. (Underneath, it's a Windows PC.) Those spreadsheets are typically pre-built by staff at trading firms, specialized for whatever they're doing. The number of keystrokes needed for most queries is very small. One of the minor Bloomberg features is something like Craigslist, but for rich people. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. If you push the Help button twice, you get text chat to Bloomberg's help desk.
- chmielewski 11y ago
  http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html
- JackFr 11y ago
  > What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free. While that's true for stocks and key rates, Bloomberg is all about bonds, and there is really no competition there. And it's not only the market data that's important. Bloomberg provides reference and indicative data on hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fixed income instruments.
  - osullivj 11y ago
    Yep, and those bond (and swap) prices are not public prices in the same way as equity prices from exchanges. They're indicative dealer quotes. ALLQ shows a stack of dealer quotes. No other system does this...
    - HiLo 11y ago
      Eh, you're a bit off. You can find compiled quotes in lots of places, and individual quotes from any broker or dealer, so there are other systems that do this (maybe none that have exactly ALLQs same dealers giving quotes). But you're right saying that many times these prices are indicative quotes from dealers.
  - HiLo 11y ago
    The same could be said for all their FICC offerings. Their equity analysis is also better than other platforms I've used. On top of that, their data on vanilla and exotic derivatives are OK but we had some issues with consistency between broker / market marks and Bloomberg marks for implied volatility on some of the most liquid contracts out there.

by mastazi 11y ago

lingben 11y ago

Most decent universities have a subscription through their econ or business schools.

Animats 11y ago

What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free. It's not that complicated. The hard part is making sense of all that numeric information. There are a number of fixed-layout screens you can pull up to follow entire markets broadly, and those come up with one or two hot-key presses. Then, there are standard analyses for individual ticker symbols. There's a news story system. There's a way to load up an Excel spreadsheet and run that, using live Bloomberg data. (Underneath, it's a Windows PC.) Those spreadsheets are typically pre-built by staff at trading firms, specialized for whatever they're doing. The number of keystrokes needed for most queries is very small. One of the minor Bloomberg features is something like Craigslist, but for rich people. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. If you push the Help button twice, you get text chat to Bloomberg's help desk.

chmielewski 11y ago
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html
JackFr 11y ago
> What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free. While that's true for stocks and key rates, Bloomberg is all about bonds, and there is really no competition there. And it's not only the market data that's important. Bloomberg provides reference and indicative data on hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fixed income instruments.
- osullivj 11y ago
  Yep, and those bond (and swap) prices are not public prices in the same way as equity prices from exchanges. They're indicative dealer quotes. ALLQ shows a stack of dealer quotes. No other system does this...
  - HiLo 11y ago
    Eh, you're a bit off. You can find compiled quotes in lots of places, and individual quotes from any broker or dealer, so there are other systems that do this (maybe none that have exactly ALLQs same dealers giving quotes). But you're right saying that many times these prices are indicative quotes from dealers.
- HiLo 11y ago
  The same could be said for all their FICC offerings. Their equity analysis is also better than other platforms I've used. On top of that, their data on vanilla and exotic derivatives are OK but we had some issues with consistency between broker / market marks and Bloomberg marks for implied volatility on some of the most liquid contracts out there.