The Bloomberg terminal is awesome! By now its been iterated to a point where it's like the Microsoft Office of Finance. It does everything and there is no way

The Bloomberg terminal is awesome! By now its been iterated to a point where it's like the Microsoft Office of Finance. It does everything and there is no way for one person to understand everything it can do. It also has the nice lock in feature of the 20% of features that each person needs is different. This is probably the biggest reason why no one is yet encroaching on their territory. it you trade debt, it has your yield curves If you trade currencies it has your currency rate matrix. Back office, you've got PORT and MARS for portfolio and risk management. Developer, you've got the Bloomberg API that allows you to pull real time quotes for any exchange in the world. And if you are stuck they do something that seems inconceivable to startups today, they have actual people you can talk to that help you figure out how to solve your problem! One other often overlooked benefit of the terminal is that Bloomberg unlocked it via Bloomberg Anywhere. This means you can install the Bloomberg terminal software on any machine you want and then login to use it so that you aren't locked to a particular machine unlike the old Bloomberg Terminals. The downside of this is that you can only be logged in at one place at a time, but pretty much everyone uses this setup nowadays. And there is IB the Bloomberg instant messenger, just by typing in a name you can talk to anyone else with a terminal, which is pretty much anyone you'd want to in finance. IB is also a sneaky way for recruiters to find out who they should be contacting:)