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It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystr
by hazard 10y ago
It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades.
Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don't mean relatively basic info like "What's the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?" or "What's the current CDS spread for Citibank?" that you can easily google for but also stuff like "Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?" and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.
Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).
Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.
- zimablue 10y agoThis is hyperbole, I've worked on dev side in finance a while now and bloomberg data is often unreliable, everywhere I've worked people have built layers on top of it, checking vs other sources and fat fingers. Also I'm actually currently working for some oil guys and they use bloomberg for some things but use specialist providers for oil macro, shipping and refinery events. I'd say their main advantages are familiarity and some information oligopolies
- _IsThisRealLife 10y agoI would argue they have established a sort of universal minimum threshold of information within the financial industry, across a ton of financial markets. This provides a certain amount of certainty/consistency within markets(really any sort of pseudo monopoly in a knowledge space does). Particularly in the news space, it sort of lets people assess to what degree they might have a competitive advantage by the degree to which their data is more accurate/earlier than that on the terminal/data side.
- jfoster 10y agoIt seems they must be getting the data through agreement with the companies they're collecting the data on. I wonder where the line is drawn between what they're doing and commercialised insider trading.
- gist 10y ago> This is hyperbole What I love about HN. I read one thing that sounds great and authoritative in a subject that I know nothing about. Just to have someone else rain on the parade! Which point of view is correct? I don't know (so I upvoted both..)
- bbcbasic 10y ago> sounds great and authoritative "sounds" being the operative word. Lots of ... lets say 'articulate' people on HN, in general. Current thread excepted.
- adamdonahue 10y agoHacker News is the ultimate waste of time. Correction: Hacker News _comments are the ultimate waste of time.
- neximo64 10y agoYou're kidding right? It is more than 99.99% correct guaranteed by an SLA. You can have errors as with any system but they're very open about it and correct it when its wrong & inform you, which is extremely rare (seen it only 1ce myself)
- zhte415 10y agoYou're correct data can sometimes be wrong, but this is mainly in the basic datasets provided, and still exceptionally rare. I once highlight a figure was wrong to their helpdesk, in an obscure money supply aggregate, bt public data that I happened to be pretty intimate with, and their helpdesk were all over a solution in seconds. For added-cost datasets, they're mainly a reseller for a 3rd party data provider and SLAs need to be checked to see what you're getting. For checking via other sources, this is a minimum in finance. Reconciliation / validation needs to be done at every step something new is introduced, and just for the heck of it usually anyway.
- urs2102 10y agoA great relative comparison as far as the keyboard goes is something like vi/vim or even QWERTY. I'm sure you could have better text editing shortcuts (power Sublime/Atom users maybe), or a better keyboard (Dvorak for example), but once people do things a certain way and develop proficiency, it's often tough to change.
- heisenbit 10y agoThat is a powerful moat. Vi users or Emacs users may die out at one point in time but they are unlikely to switch in larger numbers.
- kkkrist 10y agoI have gone from Textmate to Sublime to Atom and finally took the time to properly learn vi. vi has made my typing so vastly more efficient that I can't imagine to ever use anything else again. I guess you have never really used vi to make such a comparison, same as op has probably never used the Bloomberg Terminal.
- JBReefer 10y agoDo you feel that way about generic text or code in particular? I haven't seen Intellisense or project templating for, say, F# at the same level as a VS Code. Does this exist? I'd love to move more to Vim!
- nickpeterson 10y agoWell, except vscode is behind vs for F#. Try using a type provider on vscode, it runs like crap for anything non trivial.
- JBReefer 10y agoOh, maybe something like Js then? I just pulled the first language I thought of!
- trelliscoded 10y agoHow do I answer questions about oil tanker availability? I don't see anything in the manual about that. I guess it might be under BMAP or BI, but nothing obvious stands out to me...
- seesomesense 10y agoShipping Markets SHIP Shipping functions menu VSRC Vessel search VSTK Vessel capacity data FLET Aggregated fleet data FIXS Research daily global tanker fixtures BFX Baltic freight index BMAP Generate energy-related maps
- trelliscoded 10y agoThanks!
- raldi 10y agoPress <HELP><HELP>
- manish_gill 10y agoRelated question: What makes all this information hard to find and how do they do it? I wonder if there can be an alternative interface which will collate all this information? Like OP, I've also been curious about the Bloomberg Terminal and all the information that one supposedly has access to when using it. If nothing else, just to satisfy my curiosity, I'd love to poke around on such a system once.
- jzwinck 10y agoSome of it comes from paper documents and PDFs. Bloomberg has a team of people who organize and cross-reference such documents. If you're wondering why the original documents are not more directly machine readable, consider that some of them are published by companies due to regulatory obligations, and those companies would much prefer not to publish the information at all. So making the documents easier to consume is where Bloomberg comes in--because the originators don't want to.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe main part is not purely interface but the aggregation of data - integration with thousands of various systems, licencing agreements with thousands of proprietary data sources, automated and manual data cleanup. This isn't scalable and simply requires thousands of people and lots of work, because obtaining ocean tanker data doesn't really help you get integration for e.g. Nigerian mining industry data.
- FabHK 10y agoAlso, error scrubbing. There's lots of financial data available on yahoo, for example, but it's just lousy quality.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoCan you give an example? Not that I don't believe you.
- 10y ago
- throwawayish 10y agoOh. I'm European and I always wondered why in practically every American criminal-spy-scifi-investigative-themed TV show or movie there are people sitting at magical, proprietary computers able to find strange pieces of (personal) information in no time (but obviously always complex to use, because other characters don't know how). I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sense where that idea comes from.
- FabHK 10y agoBloomberg delivers financial information, not information on every individual.
- return0 10y agoThat's facebook's job
- cm2012 10y agoI know it's a joke, but as a high spend Facebook advertiser, I can tell you that Facebook only sells audience information in aggregate, not on an individual basis.
- sreenadh 10y ago...P R I S M...
- cm2012 10y agoThat's not sold, so not comparable to BB.
- reitanqild 10y agoEvil mode: That's not sold No, given freely away for "protection". Evil mode off: I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.
- return0 10y agoSo its like a proprietary google. Google incentivizes people to put their information publicly so they can crawl it, bloomberg gathers the info for a price. I see the two as complementary-but-future-competitors.
- floatingatoll 10y agoNon-Bloomberg users retain access to one component described above, the "hit F1 twice and immediately be connected" option, thanks to librarians. A web search for "24/7 ask-a-librarian" returns a page full of different libraries that always, without end, offer a human being ready to try and help you consult through the world of knowledge. If you're polite, they'll do their best to help. It's not like Bloomberg, where you can just interrupt your work by hitting HELP and magically get a solution provided. But it is a little-known HELP button for information research.
- anonu 10y ago> It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. I disagree that the information is hard to find. I think a lot of the data is publicly available. Bloomberg "normalizes" it for you and makes it easy and quick to access. As you point out, they have depth and breadth. And that is where the value lies. Many people have tried to compete with Bloomberg. Millions and millions of dollars have been poured into competitor products. In my opinion, you will never be able to replace Bloomberg. The key, however, is to break up the functionality. Build a better graphing tool, a better chat app, a better financial analysis tool, a data API that plugs into Excel, Python, C++, etc... etc... Also, the value offering of bbg goes beyond the terminal. For example, Bloomberg sells a lot of their "static" data in daily or hourly file updates (for $100Ks/year). They are the central hub for RFQs and IOIs. They also pour money into machine learning techniques to provide better/faster news. They sell their news firehose for top dollar and people will pay for it.