18 ms·

The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained

320 points by yarapavan 7y ago

jessriedel 7y ago
Pretty light on actual details about the terminal. Anyone recommend something more in depth?
- truebosko 7y ago
  The linked Fast Company article has additional tidbits, highlighting the amount of developers, for example. https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/the-bloomberg-terminal https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/the-bloomberg-terminal
  - chaas30 7y ago
    That story is a couple of years old at this point - the company now has more than 6,000 software engineers.
- Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
  A fair bit can be pieced together from its own website. For example these days the terminal is just a software based product which comes with a keyboard for each license. The PC is up to you to provide. You can even connect to Bloomberg using the internet but you can still use a dedicated leased line connection.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Think Emacs for traders. Special keys, odd modes, everything and the kitchen sink, you never leave it once you start it. There tutorials on youtube, but without having one to learn on it's exactly like reading about emacs.
  - bradj 7y ago
    And Eikon is the Visual Studio-like competitor.
  - swyx 7y ago
    and the defacto Slack for Wall Street decades before Slack existed. sticky as hell.
- Jorge1o1 7y ago
  Here's a pretty good tutorial [1] (albeit a bit old) on how to price credit default swaps using a typical Bloomberg function. This kind of esoteric fixed income calculator is what makes Bloomberg so dominant. Otherwise, you'd have to write all of this crap in Excel just to price a relatively simple product like a swap. Best way to see what the terminal looks like to look up help and documentation for it. Google things like "Bloomberg SWPM tutorial" [1] https://data.bloomberglp.com/bat/sites/3/2016/10/WhitePaper_Wen.pdf https://data.bloomberglp.com/bat/sites/3/2016/10/WhitePaper_...
- hnuser77 7y ago
  There are some resources posted at business schools, where Bloomberg Terminal usage is frequently part of coursework [1, 2, 3]. Also the "Bloomberg Markets" magazine (frequently sold in major airports) covers new terminal features and shows how to use the terminal to analyze trending financial topics. [1] http://businesslibrary.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=114612&p=746563 http://businesslibrary.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=114612&p=746563 [2] https://business.sdsu.edu/_resources/files/wffmlab/guides/launchpad.pdf https://business.sdsu.edu/_resources/files/wffmlab/guides/la... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anOUEiraEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anOUEiraEtg
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  I recommend going to your local business public library, they usually have a terminal. Or your local university MBA library. Just play around with it. It is a beautiful and very different machine/software. If you really want to use it, I enjoyed the book Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance which uses the Bloomberg Terminal quite a bit for interactive learning.
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    > business public library Is this a real thing?
    - TuringNYC 7y ago
      Not sure about your city, but for example, while I was in college, I accessed the Bloomberg terminal from: https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl while off-campus and while on-campus, from: https://johnson.library.cornell.edu/database/bloomberg/ https://johnson.library.cornell.edu/database/bloomberg/
    - swyx 7y ago
      absolutely. its a wonderful thing for people getting in the biz/studying for CFA.
    - vl 7y ago
      Similarly, law libraries usually have access to LexisNexis or Westlaw. It’s as useless for uninitiated as access to Bloomberg Terminal - you need to be trained to do anything useful with them.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        If you can use Google, you can use LexisNexis or Westlaw (and they both, IIRC, have excellent online help.)
- swyx 7y ago
  was a trader for years before becoming a developer. AMA.
  - kilroy123 7y ago
    Why did you stop and go into developement?
    - swyx 7y ago
      burned out, it was super high stress. multiple nights sleeping at my desk. waking up with cold sweats having nightmares about my positions. say a "good" trader gets 52% of their trades correct. that means you're wrong 48% of the time, even on the stuff you're high conviction, done a genuine amount of work on. (tbf not all shops do this, i was just in a large multimanager hedge fund that did work like that. ofc if you're at a quant shop this does not at all apply). as a junior-to-mid level person in finance, most of us are doing some form of coding anyway. i was forced to progress from vba to python to haskell based on the shops i was at. i realized that i was both good at this, enjoyed it, and didnt enjoy the trading part. so i decided to switch into dev despite having no qualifications for it. doing a js bootcamp helped fill in the holes. i'd say finance careers have a much higher ceiling for comp, my boss was pulling in 2m/yr at age 33ish, but he was both lucky and exceptional. i wasn't gonna be him. at my career trajectory (the vast majority of us in finance) i'd probably be more like 200-500k/yr. just kinda not worth it if i could go to tech and make somewhat less but with far better quality of life.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    Do these lines and tangents drawn on the price graphs are actually useful?
    - swyx 7y ago
      only very occasionally, specifically because other people use them as support and resistance levels. that sht is real. but otherwise.. yeah most of the time technical analysis is extreme backfit tea leaf reading mixed up with poor understanding of value vs momentum factors.
- donarb 7y ago
  In the past few years, Bloomberg has been sponsoring a booth at PyCon US (they're always hiring). They have a 3 screen terminal setup there where you can see it in action and ask questions about how it works. They will be there again at PyCon in April in Pittsburgh.
fn42 7y ago
I was at a financial startup ~ 2012 and remember getting a couple of these to play with. They came in the form of 1U servers (HP I think) running RHEL5 that each needed a public IP that was open to bloomberg. I think the client app was windows only at that time, I wonder how much has changed
- zmk_ 7y ago
  I do not think it runs on anything but windows, but you can install the terminal software on any Windows computer you want. They are now selling "Anywhere" subscriptions that basically let you move from one machine to another.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    It does not, but you can use a Citrix Receiver client to RDP into an hosted instance.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Almost nothing changes with it. I wonder if they're still 32 bit? I'm guessing the RHEL boxes were for VPN gateways?
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    The architecture of Terminal V2 is significantly different! And I'm still not sure if it's launched!
    - exikyut 7y ago
      This sounds very interesting, and naturally googling doesn't find anything relevant. Anywhere I can read/learn more?
    - lallysingh 7y ago
      Which Terminal V2? There have been quite a few attempts over the years... Remember it's like a 30 yr old platform. The more times they try to kill it and fail the stronger it becomes.
rbinv 7y ago
The actual title is "How Mike Bloomberg made his billions: a computer system you’ve probably never seen", which much more closely describes the actual article (as there's not that much detail about the terminal itself).
- w23j 7y ago
  Exactly. That's why I was reading the article. But it is only about the business model.
- blackearl 7y ago
  I spun off into the keyboard link which seemed more interesting - https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomberg-keyboard/ https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomb...
- vxNsr 7y ago
  Wait is the point of this article to give Bloomberg some positive press and make him seem technical?
  - apaprocki 7y ago
    I don’t know anything about the article, but he has an EE degree from Johns Hopkins, so he doesn’t need to seem technical.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    He _is_ technical. He's seen as a political or business figure but he's really a tech billionaire of the same era as Gates or Jobs.
bilekas 7y ago
I would love to be a fly on the wall in those chat rooms it facilitates..
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  The chat rooms have really interesting features, like pinning and rich-embedding equity information that updates in real time. Also, you can "ring" the room with a bell, which was immensely entertaining as an intern.
  - exikyut 7y ago
    Now I'm remembering the MSN 'nudge' feature...
  - bluejay2 7y ago
    Ringing the bell is grounds for expulsion from many chat rooms, at least the semi-anonymous chat rooms provided by Bloomberg and other sell sides shops. Apparently it is very annoying to certain people.
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
      Not surprised. A few interns were able to crash IB one year by spamming a chat with timed bells.
    - ianai 7y ago
      What are the valid uses for the ring?
      - bluejay2 7y ago
        Good question. I think of it as being equivalent to marking an email “high priority”. In my experience brokers would sometimes use it to call attention to a time-sensitive issue, eg confirming details for a trade settling today. Always thought it was annoying and if they had something really urgent they should just pick up the phone, but that’s just me.
xerox13ster 7y ago
I had to reinstall one of these after one of the top trading brass in oil futures at Wal-mart got affected by those fake Microsoft Support scammers and they put the boot lock on his computer. It's a pain to set up, but it's authentication is unbelievable. It has something like triple factor authentication plus biometrics. To get him logged in to test it so I could make sure it spread across his 5 monitors correctly, I had to use his RSA key + password to log in to the website, then use a physical device that reads flashes on the screen to generate another code with another password, before he finally put in another password and scanned his fingerprint on the keyboard. It was mind-boggling, but not unexpected given this dude was moving millions every day.
- sbolt 7y ago
  Off topic but I'm curious why Walmart employs futures traders?
  - phdp 7y ago
    I imagine that, just like airlines use futures to hedge the price risk of jet fuel, they do the same for their vast logistics operation. They can lock in prices so they aren’t suddenly facing a massive bill if gas goes way up.
    - sbolt 7y ago
      That makes a lot of sense, their logistics operation is massive!
    - formercoder 7y ago
      Interestingly airlines are divided on hedging and not all participate in it https://www.eurofinance.com/news/airlines-divided-on-hedge-benefits-as-oil-volatility-surges/ https://www.eurofinance.com/news/airlines-divided-on-hedge-b...
      - selectodude 7y ago
        You can make an indirect bet on oil futures by trading airline stocks. Southwest Airlines (LUV) if it's going up, American Airlines (AAL) if it's going down.
Tenoke 7y ago
After reading threads like these[1]. I can't help but feel that MOST interfaces should indeed be like the bloomberg terminal - great example of security-focused, minimal latency and maximum functionality product. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417
- CuriousReader13 7y ago
  In reality, however, some Bloomberg users struggle daily with inaccurate data, lack of documentation, manual (slow) help on trivial issues, and poor performance when running analytics. It is more like a bloated GUI app pretending to be a terminal, worst of both worlds.
- skizm 7y ago
  The terminal is extremely slow most of the time and constantly crashes. I agree it is very secure and the software is designed for power users (mouse almost never needed), but it isn’t exactly a marvel of engineering. It’s basically a giant piece of legacy code.
  - mrlala 7y ago
    >The terminal is extremely slow most of the time and constantly crashes Ok your comment is mindboggling to me. Having used Bloomberg for nearly 10 years, not only for the front-end but the back-end API I can tell you it is the most stable piece of software I've ever seen. Not once, not one single time has it crashed in those 10+ years for us. The API is even more impressive- to my knowledge we never even experience a single missed query or randomly dead data stream over all those years. The terminal is expensive as hell, but they deliver on the cost. Also just by the fact of how it's used, saying it constantly crashes and assuming it's just like that and traders are ok with that all day long? Whatever experience you seem to have must be an extreme outlier. >It’s basically a giant piece of legacy code. Eh I think that's silly. You even say it's designed for the power users, which is absolutly right. That's the only reason you think it's legacy. Are you telling me everything behind and their back-end is not extremely advanced? It has to be to support the amount of data that is flowing through them at every second in data that HAS to be fast & accurate.
ken 7y ago
I don't think they're quite as rare as they make it sound. It seems like half the restaurants in NYC have one. Though I would believe that most people who have seen one didn't realize what it is.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Why would half of restaurants in NYC need a service that costs $20k per year?
  - czinck 7y ago
    They don't need it, but their customers might. I always imagined it was like in movies about rich people in the 80s where the waiter would interrupt the lunch with a note on a silver platter, and they run off because Saudia Arabia just cut oil production and oil futures are going crazy or something. But wait! They don't have to go all the way to their office because there's a Bloomberg right here! "Half" is almost certainly an exaggeration, but there's probably a few places on Wall Street that serve $200 steaks or whatever for lunch regularly that have one. And it probably gets used only a few times a month, if at all, and they consider it an advertising expense. Disclaimer: I was a programmer for Bloomberg, but I never saw one in a restaurant.
    - Animats 7y ago
      The Bank of America branch on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, near the headquarters of the major VCs, had a public access Bloomberg terminal in the lobby for a year. May have been a marketing demo from Bloomberg.
  - obmelvin 7y ago
    Specifically, a financial information service.
  - blue11 7y ago
    Making a reservation or ordering food from Bloomberg Chat actually sounds like a feature that would be used by a lot of traders. I doubt that there are many restaurants that have a Bloomberg account though (there is no need for a physical terminal, Bloomberg Anywhere can run in a browser).
sparsely 7y ago
The terminal, and particularly the business model around it, is widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data, and they tie it to the terminal. There are all sorts of contractual requirements around data not leaving the machine the terminal. It's not uncommon to hear stories about small trading shops or asset managers having a shared terminals which they run over to do specific actions, or a substantial amount of effort being put into automated data extraction which avoids Bloomberg's controls.
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  >> widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data I agree the terminals are disdained, but I never understood this. The rest of your comment justifies the value. They provide great data (which they spend a boatload of money to get/clean) and they sell it. Customers don't have to buy it, they can try to get the data themselves. I used a BB terminal extensively for over a decade. It saved me orders of magnitude in work, there is no way I could have obtained all this data myself on an ongoing basis and had it available easily via API. They make a lot of money, and they deserve it. I had colleagues try to switch to Reuters terminals and they came ashamedly back to Bloomberg, hat in hand.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    The complaint seems pretty straightforward to me. As you note, the value Bloomberg provides is all in its data and software, not in the physical terminal itself. The terminal is effectively just DRM, a giant dongle you have to use to access the data and services. Back in the day you could make an argument for the value of locking services to a proprietary terminal, since most people didn't have a computer on their desk and all and there were no common standards for those that did. But these days there is a ubiquitously accessible common standard for desktop information systems: the x86-based PC running Microsoft Windows. Having to use a proprietary terminal means not being able to use all the knowledge of that standard platform the user has built up over the years, and having to build up a new stock of knowledge about the baroque weirdnesses of that proprietary terminal. So I can totally see how someone would wish they could just access that highly valuable data and software on the machine they already know how to use.
monkeydust 7y ago
The terminal has been so successful largely because of timing and damn good execution. Mike was at the right place at the right time with changes around the financial industry and move to digitization to capture the uplift these brought to the product it has become. It created cloud computing and social network before those terms were officially defined. Its distribution is such that any new startup hedge fund for example has to have one to be taken seriously by its investors and to deal effectively with brokers. Other firms continue to try to beat it and in some sectors for certain functions they have but no one really has hurt it in its entirety... Thompson Reuters now Refinitiv has had best shot but honestly it's barley left a dent.
gadders 7y ago
The terminals are popular, but having worked with some of the staff at Bloomberg to get MIFID related changes implemented, they didn't impress me at all.
pp19dd 7y ago
And not a mention of the Bloomberg Terminal spying scandal using privileged information. NY Post broke the story in 2013: https://nypost.com/2013/05/10/goldman-outs-bloomberg-snoops/ https://nypost.com/2013/05/10/goldman-outs-bloomberg-snoops/ "a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time" This is basically access to analytics. From a now-missing huffpo piece: "reporters were able to access a few different kinds of data that are not available to other terminal users. These included the ability to see how often customers had logged onto terminals and the ability to track some of their activities. They could see how many times in a month a client had entered specific commands on a terminal to, for example, look at information about foreign currencies or pull up economic indicators." And why: "With these tools, Bloomberg reporters could keep loose tabs on terminal users, which include government officials and high-profile investors and traders. Though the tools were limited, they were potentially useful enough to give reporters leads to news scoops — the ultimate goal at an organization that prides itself on its news-breaking abilities."
- H8crilA 7y ago
  It is mentioned in the article. > There’s also a discomfort about just how much information and data Bloomberg has through the terminals. In 2013, Bloomberg News reporters were caught using the terminal to get subscribers’ information and monitor when they logged in and what they were using it for. Bloomberg admitted that it was commonplace for reporters to have access to “limited client information,” apologized, and said it had changed its system.
  - pp19dd 7y ago
    "Discomfort." That's not inaccurate, but it minimizes the impact of this scandal. It's not as if this was just a couple of bad apples who got caught. The reality is more ethically questionable. Follow-up by the Atlantic: "reporters at the company were for years not only permitted, but frequently and forcefully encouraged, to monitor Blomberg's terminal customers for news" ; "... he used the function to surreptitiously track the movements of the CEO of Fiat as he traveled across the United States." https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/bloombergs-terminal-snooping-more-widespread-wall-street-thought/314236/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/bloombe... Terminal customers also included news agencies, their competitors.
CodeSheikh 7y ago
"You’re not going to win the Super Bowl if you aren’t even playing in the right stadium." Terrible analogy.
lordnacho 7y ago
I used a Bloomberg terminal for years and years, both as a user and as a coder. - It's quite convenient for business side people. I used it to trade all sorts of things (FI, credit, equities, fx, derivs on all those) and there was always some convenient function you could type in to give you a calculator for whatever it was. Whatever derivatives model you found in a textbook, you could find it in the terminal. With relevant data loaded in. - Data is convenient too. Once you know how to work the API, you can pull a huge amount of data. A lot of it is available elsewhere, but nowhere has so much in one place, in one API. - They are very serious about you not sharing the terminal or the data. Obviously once you have the data in a text file, they can't do much about that, but they do limit the amount you can download, and then they phone you once you trigger something. Sounds like a warning, but also a sales call at the same time. - It's not so easy to share the terminal itself. The standard tricks like installing it on a VM, or installing remote desktop / VNC won't work. I'm sure someone has figured it out, but it's not as easy as sharing most other software services. They'd be fine with a small business sharing a terminal though, as long as it stayed on one machine that different staff would take turns on. And in case you thought a Bloomberg Anywhere would solve it for your distributed team, that used to use a special biometric device. Not sure if it's still there. - Chats I'm guessing are not nearly as interesting as a few years ago, before the revelations about what was being said. I never got much gossip, but it really depends on where you're sitting in the market. You can use them as a replacement for voice trading, and everything is recorded. And it warns you if you're about to send a swear word, heh. - A lot of small firms use the terminal to trade directly with counterparties, there's a whole OTC infrastructure in there. I never used it much but all the banks had their own Bloomberg pages for doing trades in all sorts of things with them. - In terms of infrastructure, you can get a dedicated line for your bbg, they come and stick some stuff into your rack. This can fail over to internet if you want, simply a matter of changing the config on the app and phoning them. Also IIRC you can get a special data server, depending on whether the guy above scared you into buying one. - The help function is for users, not coders. You'll wait for ages while the agent on the helpdesk figures out that he doesn't understand your problem if you're a coder. If not he'll find the business function you're after quite fast. Every time I got through to a dev about something that needed to be changed, it went into a suggestions queue and stayed there.
moomin 7y ago
I’d really quite like to read an article about the actual architecture of the terminal software. It’s a phenomenal piece of work that operates under some absolutely brain-bending constraints.
dtrailin 7y ago
Having worked at Bloomberg I really wish there was more content published about how it's implemented because it pretty astonishing in both good and bad ways. For one thing the codebase is ancient there are still some Fortran bits that in use today. However the more modern code is in C/C++ and designed heavily with latency in mind. In particular the feeds are designed to be extremely fast with a few custom built high performance databases built to serve this [0]. The bit that really amazed me was the way the front end is implemented. The front-end is fully rendered server side (meaning every click requires a full round trip to Bloombergs servers) in Javascript using spidermonkey. This caused a lot of difficulties since any real time elements needed to be rendered in a totally different way. As well the version of Javascript was restricted from using things like timers or callbacks since that could make rendering stall. In some ways it's impressive that they were doing server side Javascript at least 5 years before nodeJS but whole approach seems like a byproduct of age of mainframes. [0] https://bloomberg.github.io/comdb2/overview_home.html https://bloomberg.github.io/comdb2/overview_home.html
- aledthemathguy 7y ago
  That's so interesting! Thx for sharing this.
- dkersten 7y ago
  > designed heavily with latency in mind > The front-end is fully rendered server side (meaning every click requires a full round trip to Bloombergs servers) O_o Ok ok I guess that’s not the area where they care about low latency?
  - wtetzner 7y ago
    Or they care about latency so much because they need to keep full page load latency as low as possible?
- wtetzner 7y ago
  What was the reason for using Javascript to do the server-side rendering (as opposed to another language on the server)? Was it just a preference, or were there some technical reasons?
rootbear 7y ago
I am increasingly seeing "software" used as a discrete noun, rather than as a continuous noun or an adjective, as in this line from the article: "The terminal — a software officially named Bloomberg Professional — is still a major part of Bloomberg’s overall business [...]" I know languages grow and change, but this really grinds on my ears. Not so long ago, the author would have written "a program", or "a software program", or "an application". I see no value in the change.
- aetimmes 7y ago
  In the HPC world, programs are sometimes referred to as 'codes'. Everyone's nomenclature is a little different.
haileris 7y ago
I've been obsessed with the Bloomberg terminal ever since I discovered my latent love for finance a few years back. I actually got to check one out, but didn't really get to play with it as much as I liked. One day I'll be able to afford the $14k/yr.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  Can anybody get one as long as they can afford the subscription?
  - isaachier 7y ago
    Having worked there, I believe the answer is yes, assuming you aren't living in a country that has an economic sanction against it, etc.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  One trick I heard was to take finance courses at a community college/university that owns a terminal license. Johns Hopkins specifically has a bunch of terminals donated by Bloomberg himself.
- swyx 7y ago
  let me push you a little harder - why exactly do you feel you want it or need it? i bet i can find you replacements for each individual component. if you aren't institutional, you dont need bloomberg.
- divbzero 7y ago
  As mentioned in an earlier comment [1] NYPL offers public access to a Bloomberg terminal in their SIBL branch at 34th & Madison [2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847130 [2]: https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl This might be unique to NYC. I’d be curious if other public libraries or institutions offer similar access.
- nly 7y ago
  Easiest thing for you to do would probably be to take a job there, since all employees get access.
everling 7y ago
I use the terminal in my work. I’ve come to loathe the obtuse UX - every function like PORT or EMSX has its own peculiar design that has to be learned by trial and error. A button named ”cancel” might be placed in a way that would imply closing a window but in reality cancels a trade. The archaic design is a trademark in its own right, so it’ll be around forever it seems.
tptacek 7y ago
Everything I've ever read about BB terminals make them sound like Dwarf Fortress for Finance.
dgudkov 7y ago
Fun fact: Information from the Bloomberg terminal can also be received right into Excel using special VBA functions. Although, there are licensing restrictions on sharing such information.
droitbutch 7y ago
> "And while the terminal can be hard to learn — it’s not very intuitive — once they pick it up, a lot of people don’t want to learn a new tool and run the risk of making a mistake. ... The terminal is sticky." So TLDR: it's vi for traders!

320 points by yarapavan 7y ago

jessriedel 7y ago

Pretty light on actual details about the terminal. Anyone recommend something more in depth?

truebosko 7y ago
The linked Fast Company article has additional tidbits, highlighting the amount of developers, for example. https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/the-bloomberg-terminal https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/the-bloomberg-terminal
- chaas30 7y ago
  That story is a couple of years old at this point - the company now has more than 6,000 software engineers.
Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
A fair bit can be pieced together from its own website. For example these days the terminal is just a software based product which comes with a keyboard for each license. The PC is up to you to provide. You can even connect to Bloomberg using the internet but you can still use a dedicated leased line connection.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buzzkillington 7y ago
Think Emacs for traders. Special keys, odd modes, everything and the kitchen sink, you never leave it once you start it. There tutorials on youtube, but without having one to learn on it's exactly like reading about emacs.
- bradj 7y ago
  And Eikon is the Visual Studio-like competitor.
- swyx 7y ago
  and the defacto Slack for Wall Street decades before Slack existed. sticky as hell.
Jorge1o1 7y ago
Here's a pretty good tutorial [1] (albeit a bit old) on how to price credit default swaps using a typical Bloomberg function. This kind of esoteric fixed income calculator is what makes Bloomberg so dominant. Otherwise, you'd have to write all of this crap in Excel just to price a relatively simple product like a swap. Best way to see what the terminal looks like to look up help and documentation for it. Google things like "Bloomberg SWPM tutorial" [1] https://data.bloomberglp.com/bat/sites/3/2016/10/WhitePaper_Wen.pdf https://data.bloomberglp.com/bat/sites/3/2016/10/WhitePaper_...
hnuser77 7y ago
There are some resources posted at business schools, where Bloomberg Terminal usage is frequently part of coursework [1, 2, 3]. Also the "Bloomberg Markets" magazine (frequently sold in major airports) covers new terminal features and shows how to use the terminal to analyze trending financial topics. [1] http://businesslibrary.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=114612&p=746563 http://businesslibrary.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=114612&p=746563 [2] https://business.sdsu.edu/_resources/files/wffmlab/guides/launchpad.pdf https://business.sdsu.edu/_resources/files/wffmlab/guides/la... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anOUEiraEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anOUEiraEtg
TuringNYC 7y ago
I recommend going to your local business public library, they usually have a terminal. Or your local university MBA library. Just play around with it. It is a beautiful and very different machine/software. If you really want to use it, I enjoyed the book Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance which uses the Bloomberg Terminal quite a bit for interactive learning.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  > business public library Is this a real thing?
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    Not sure about your city, but for example, while I was in college, I accessed the Bloomberg terminal from: https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl while off-campus and while on-campus, from: https://johnson.library.cornell.edu/database/bloomberg/ https://johnson.library.cornell.edu/database/bloomberg/
  - swyx 7y ago
    absolutely. its a wonderful thing for people getting in the biz/studying for CFA.
  - vl 7y ago
    Similarly, law libraries usually have access to LexisNexis or Westlaw. It’s as useless for uninitiated as access to Bloomberg Terminal - you need to be trained to do anything useful with them.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      If you can use Google, you can use LexisNexis or Westlaw (and they both, IIRC, have excellent online help.)
swyx 7y ago
was a trader for years before becoming a developer. AMA.
- kilroy123 7y ago
  Why did you stop and go into developement?
  - swyx 7y ago
    burned out, it was super high stress. multiple nights sleeping at my desk. waking up with cold sweats having nightmares about my positions. say a "good" trader gets 52% of their trades correct. that means you're wrong 48% of the time, even on the stuff you're high conviction, done a genuine amount of work on. (tbf not all shops do this, i was just in a large multimanager hedge fund that did work like that. ofc if you're at a quant shop this does not at all apply). as a junior-to-mid level person in finance, most of us are doing some form of coding anyway. i was forced to progress from vba to python to haskell based on the shops i was at. i realized that i was both good at this, enjoyed it, and didnt enjoy the trading part. so i decided to switch into dev despite having no qualifications for it. doing a js bootcamp helped fill in the holes. i'd say finance careers have a much higher ceiling for comp, my boss was pulling in 2m/yr at age 33ish, but he was both lucky and exceptional. i wasn't gonna be him. at my career trajectory (the vast majority of us in finance) i'd probably be more like 200-500k/yr. just kinda not worth it if i could go to tech and make somewhat less but with far better quality of life.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Do these lines and tangents drawn on the price graphs are actually useful?
  - swyx 7y ago
    only very occasionally, specifically because other people use them as support and resistance levels. that sht is real. but otherwise.. yeah most of the time technical analysis is extreme backfit tea leaf reading mixed up with poor understanding of value vs momentum factors.
donarb 7y ago
In the past few years, Bloomberg has been sponsoring a booth at PyCon US (they're always hiring). They have a 3 screen terminal setup there where you can see it in action and ask questions about how it works. They will be there again at PyCon in April in Pittsburgh.

fn42 7y ago

I was at a financial startup ~ 2012 and remember getting a couple of these to play with. They came in the form of 1U servers (HP I think) running RHEL5 that each needed a public IP that was open to bloomberg. I think the client app was windows only at that time, I wonder how much has changed

zmk_ 7y ago
I do not think it runs on anything but windows, but you can install the terminal software on any Windows computer you want. They are now selling "Anywhere" subscriptions that basically let you move from one machine to another.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  It does not, but you can use a Citrix Receiver client to RDP into an hosted instance.
lallysingh 7y ago
Almost nothing changes with it. I wonder if they're still 32 bit? I'm guessing the RHEL boxes were for VPN gateways?
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  The architecture of Terminal V2 is significantly different! And I'm still not sure if it's launched!
  - exikyut 7y ago
    This sounds very interesting, and naturally googling doesn't find anything relevant. Anywhere I can read/learn more?
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    Which Terminal V2? There have been quite a few attempts over the years... Remember it's like a 30 yr old platform. The more times they try to kill it and fail the stronger it becomes.

rbinv 7y ago

The actual title is "How Mike Bloomberg made his billions: a computer system you’ve probably never seen", which much more closely describes the actual article (as there's not that much detail about the terminal itself).

w23j 7y ago
Exactly. That's why I was reading the article. But it is only about the business model.
blackearl 7y ago
I spun off into the keyboard link which seemed more interesting - https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomberg-keyboard/ https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomb...
vxNsr 7y ago
Wait is the point of this article to give Bloomberg some positive press and make him seem technical?
- apaprocki 7y ago
  I don’t know anything about the article, but he has an EE degree from Johns Hopkins, so he doesn’t need to seem technical.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  He _is_ technical. He's seen as a political or business figure but he's really a tech billionaire of the same era as Gates or Jobs.

bilekas 7y ago

I would love to be a fly on the wall in those chat rooms it facilitates..

akhilcacharya 7y ago
The chat rooms have really interesting features, like pinning and rich-embedding equity information that updates in real time. Also, you can "ring" the room with a bell, which was immensely entertaining as an intern.
- exikyut 7y ago
  Now I'm remembering the MSN 'nudge' feature...
- bluejay2 7y ago
  Ringing the bell is grounds for expulsion from many chat rooms, at least the semi-anonymous chat rooms provided by Bloomberg and other sell sides shops. Apparently it is very annoying to certain people.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    Not surprised. A few interns were able to crash IB one year by spamming a chat with timed bells.
  - ianai 7y ago
    What are the valid uses for the ring?
    - bluejay2 7y ago
      Good question. I think of it as being equivalent to marking an email “high priority”. In my experience brokers would sometimes use it to call attention to a time-sensitive issue, eg confirming details for a trade settling today. Always thought it was annoying and if they had something really urgent they should just pick up the phone, but that’s just me.

xerox13ster 7y ago

I had to reinstall one of these after one of the top trading brass in oil futures at Wal-mart got affected by those fake Microsoft Support scammers and they put the boot lock on his computer. It's a pain to set up, but it's authentication is unbelievable. It has something like triple factor authentication plus biometrics. To get him logged in to test it so I could make sure it spread across his 5 monitors correctly, I had to use his RSA key + password to log in to the website, then use a physical device that reads flashes on the screen to generate another code with another password, before he finally put in another password and scanned his fingerprint on the keyboard. It was mind-boggling, but not unexpected given this dude was moving millions every day.

sbolt 7y ago
Off topic but I'm curious why Walmart employs futures traders?
- phdp 7y ago
  I imagine that, just like airlines use futures to hedge the price risk of jet fuel, they do the same for their vast logistics operation. They can lock in prices so they aren’t suddenly facing a massive bill if gas goes way up.
  - sbolt 7y ago
    That makes a lot of sense, their logistics operation is massive!
  - formercoder 7y ago
    Interestingly airlines are divided on hedging and not all participate in it https://www.eurofinance.com/news/airlines-divided-on-hedge-benefits-as-oil-volatility-surges/ https://www.eurofinance.com/news/airlines-divided-on-hedge-b...
    - selectodude 7y ago
      You can make an indirect bet on oil futures by trading airline stocks. Southwest Airlines (LUV) if it's going up, American Airlines (AAL) if it's going down.

Tenoke 7y ago

After reading threads like these[1]. I can't help but feel that MOST interfaces should indeed be like the bloomberg terminal - great example of security-focused, minimal latency and maximum functionality product. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417

CuriousReader13 7y ago
In reality, however, some Bloomberg users struggle daily with inaccurate data, lack of documentation, manual (slow) help on trivial issues, and poor performance when running analytics. It is more like a bloated GUI app pretending to be a terminal, worst of both worlds.
skizm 7y ago
The terminal is extremely slow most of the time and constantly crashes. I agree it is very secure and the software is designed for power users (mouse almost never needed), but it isn’t exactly a marvel of engineering. It’s basically a giant piece of legacy code.
- mrlala 7y ago
  >The terminal is extremely slow most of the time and constantly crashes Ok your comment is mindboggling to me. Having used Bloomberg for nearly 10 years, not only for the front-end but the back-end API I can tell you it is the most stable piece of software I've ever seen. Not once, not one single time has it crashed in those 10+ years for us. The API is even more impressive- to my knowledge we never even experience a single missed query or randomly dead data stream over all those years. The terminal is expensive as hell, but they deliver on the cost. Also just by the fact of how it's used, saying it constantly crashes and assuming it's just like that and traders are ok with that all day long? Whatever experience you seem to have must be an extreme outlier. >It’s basically a giant piece of legacy code. Eh I think that's silly. You even say it's designed for the power users, which is absolutly right. That's the only reason you think it's legacy. Are you telling me everything behind and their back-end is not extremely advanced? It has to be to support the amount of data that is flowing through them at every second in data that HAS to be fast & accurate.

ken 7y ago

I don't think they're quite as rare as they make it sound. It seems like half the restaurants in NYC have one. Though I would believe that most people who have seen one didn't realize what it is.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
Why would half of restaurants in NYC need a service that costs $20k per year?
- czinck 7y ago
  They don't need it, but their customers might. I always imagined it was like in movies about rich people in the 80s where the waiter would interrupt the lunch with a note on a silver platter, and they run off because Saudia Arabia just cut oil production and oil futures are going crazy or something. But wait! They don't have to go all the way to their office because there's a Bloomberg right here! "Half" is almost certainly an exaggeration, but there's probably a few places on Wall Street that serve $200 steaks or whatever for lunch regularly that have one. And it probably gets used only a few times a month, if at all, and they consider it an advertising expense. Disclaimer: I was a programmer for Bloomberg, but I never saw one in a restaurant.
  - Animats 7y ago
    The Bank of America branch on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, near the headquarters of the major VCs, had a public access Bloomberg terminal in the lobby for a year. May have been a marketing demo from Bloomberg.
- obmelvin 7y ago
  Specifically, a financial information service.
- blue11 7y ago
  Making a reservation or ordering food from Bloomberg Chat actually sounds like a feature that would be used by a lot of traders. I doubt that there are many restaurants that have a Bloomberg account though (there is no need for a physical terminal, Bloomberg Anywhere can run in a browser).

sparsely 7y ago

The terminal, and particularly the business model around it, is widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data, and they tie it to the terminal. There are all sorts of contractual requirements around data not leaving the machine the terminal. It's not uncommon to hear stories about small trading shops or asset managers having a shared terminals which they run over to do specific actions, or a substantial amount of effort being put into automated data extraction which avoids Bloomberg's controls.

TuringNYC 7y ago
>> widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data I agree the terminals are disdained, but I never understood this. The rest of your comment justifies the value. They provide great data (which they spend a boatload of money to get/clean) and they sell it. Customers don't have to buy it, they can try to get the data themselves. I used a BB terminal extensively for over a decade. It saved me orders of magnitude in work, there is no way I could have obtained all this data myself on an ongoing basis and had it available easily via API. They make a lot of money, and they deserve it. I had colleagues try to switch to Reuters terminals and they came ashamedly back to Bloomberg, hat in hand.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  The complaint seems pretty straightforward to me. As you note, the value Bloomberg provides is all in its data and software, not in the physical terminal itself. The terminal is effectively just DRM, a giant dongle you have to use to access the data and services. Back in the day you could make an argument for the value of locking services to a proprietary terminal, since most people didn't have a computer on their desk and all and there were no common standards for those that did. But these days there is a ubiquitously accessible common standard for desktop information systems: the x86-based PC running Microsoft Windows. Having to use a proprietary terminal means not being able to use all the knowledge of that standard platform the user has built up over the years, and having to build up a new stock of knowledge about the baroque weirdnesses of that proprietary terminal. So I can totally see how someone would wish they could just access that highly valuable data and software on the machine they already know how to use.

monkeydust 7y ago

The terminal has been so successful largely because of timing and damn good execution. Mike was at the right place at the right time with changes around the financial industry and move to digitization to capture the uplift these brought to the product it has become. It created cloud computing and social network before those terms were officially defined. Its distribution is such that any new startup hedge fund for example has to have one to be taken seriously by its investors and to deal effectively with brokers. Other firms continue to try to beat it and in some sectors for certain functions they have but no one really has hurt it in its entirety... Thompson Reuters now Refinitiv has had best shot but honestly it's barley left a dent.

gadders 7y ago

The terminals are popular, but having worked with some of the staff at Bloomberg to get MIFID related changes implemented, they didn't impress me at all.

pp19dd 7y ago

And not a mention of the Bloomberg Terminal spying scandal using privileged information. NY Post broke the story in 2013: https://nypost.com/2013/05/10/goldman-outs-bloomberg-snoops/ https://nypost.com/2013/05/10/goldman-outs-bloomberg-snoops/ "a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time" This is basically access to analytics. From a now-missing huffpo piece: "reporters were able to access a few different kinds of data that are not available to other terminal users. These included the ability to see how often customers had logged onto terminals and the ability to track some of their activities. They could see how many times in a month a client had entered specific commands on a terminal to, for example, look at information about foreign currencies or pull up economic indicators." And why: "With these tools, Bloomberg reporters could keep loose tabs on terminal users, which include government officials and high-profile investors and traders. Though the tools were limited, they were potentially useful enough to give reporters leads to news scoops — the ultimate goal at an organization that prides itself on its news-breaking abilities."

H8crilA 7y ago
It is mentioned in the article. > There’s also a discomfort about just how much information and data Bloomberg has through the terminals. In 2013, Bloomberg News reporters were caught using the terminal to get subscribers’ information and monitor when they logged in and what they were using it for. Bloomberg admitted that it was commonplace for reporters to have access to “limited client information,” apologized, and said it had changed its system.
- pp19dd 7y ago
  "Discomfort." That's not inaccurate, but it minimizes the impact of this scandal. It's not as if this was just a couple of bad apples who got caught. The reality is more ethically questionable. Follow-up by the Atlantic: "reporters at the company were for years not only permitted, but frequently and forcefully encouraged, to monitor Blomberg's terminal customers for news" ; "... he used the function to surreptitiously track the movements of the CEO of Fiat as he traveled across the United States." https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/bloombergs-terminal-snooping-more-widespread-wall-street-thought/314236/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/bloombe... Terminal customers also included news agencies, their competitors.

CodeSheikh 7y ago

"You’re not going to win the Super Bowl if you aren’t even playing in the right stadium." Terrible analogy.

lordnacho 7y ago

I used a Bloomberg terminal for years and years, both as a user and as a coder. - It's quite convenient for business side people. I used it to trade all sorts of things (FI, credit, equities, fx, derivs on all those) and there was always some convenient function you could type in to give you a calculator for whatever it was. Whatever derivatives model you found in a textbook, you could find it in the terminal. With relevant data loaded in. - Data is convenient too. Once you know how to work the API, you can pull a huge amount of data. A lot of it is available elsewhere, but nowhere has so much in one place, in one API. - They are very serious about you not sharing the terminal or the data. Obviously once you have the data in a text file, they can't do much about that, but they do limit the amount you can download, and then they phone you once you trigger something. Sounds like a warning, but also a sales call at the same time. - It's not so easy to share the terminal itself. The standard tricks like installing it on a VM, or installing remote desktop / VNC won't work. I'm sure someone has figured it out, but it's not as easy as sharing most other software services. They'd be fine with a small business sharing a terminal though, as long as it stayed on one machine that different staff would take turns on. And in case you thought a Bloomberg Anywhere would solve it for your distributed team, that used to use a special biometric device. Not sure if it's still there. - Chats I'm guessing are not nearly as interesting as a few years ago, before the revelations about what was being said. I never got much gossip, but it really depends on where you're sitting in the market. You can use them as a replacement for voice trading, and everything is recorded. And it warns you if you're about to send a swear word, heh. - A lot of small firms use the terminal to trade directly with counterparties, there's a whole OTC infrastructure in there. I never used it much but all the banks had their own Bloomberg pages for doing trades in all sorts of things with them. - In terms of infrastructure, you can get a dedicated line for your bbg, they come and stick some stuff into your rack. This can fail over to internet if you want, simply a matter of changing the config on the app and phoning them. Also IIRC you can get a special data server, depending on whether the guy above scared you into buying one. - The help function is for users, not coders. You'll wait for ages while the agent on the helpdesk figures out that he doesn't understand your problem if you're a coder. If not he'll find the business function you're after quite fast. Every time I got through to a dev about something that needed to be changed, it went into a suggestions queue and stayed there.

moomin 7y ago

I’d really quite like to read an article about the actual architecture of the terminal software. It’s a phenomenal piece of work that operates under some absolutely brain-bending constraints.

dtrailin 7y ago

Having worked at Bloomberg I really wish there was more content published about how it's implemented because it pretty astonishing in both good and bad ways. For one thing the codebase is ancient there are still some Fortran bits that in use today. However the more modern code is in C/C++ and designed heavily with latency in mind. In particular the feeds are designed to be extremely fast with a few custom built high performance databases built to serve this [0]. The bit that really amazed me was the way the front end is implemented. The front-end is fully rendered server side (meaning every click requires a full round trip to Bloombergs servers) in Javascript using spidermonkey. This caused a lot of difficulties since any real time elements needed to be rendered in a totally different way. As well the version of Javascript was restricted from using things like timers or callbacks since that could make rendering stall. In some ways it's impressive that they were doing server side Javascript at least 5 years before nodeJS but whole approach seems like a byproduct of age of mainframes. [0] https://bloomberg.github.io/comdb2/overview_home.html https://bloomberg.github.io/comdb2/overview_home.html

aledthemathguy 7y ago
That's so interesting! Thx for sharing this.
dkersten 7y ago
> designed heavily with latency in mind > The front-end is fully rendered server side (meaning every click requires a full round trip to Bloombergs servers) O_o Ok ok I guess that’s not the area where they care about low latency?
- wtetzner 7y ago
  Or they care about latency so much because they need to keep full page load latency as low as possible?
wtetzner 7y ago
What was the reason for using Javascript to do the server-side rendering (as opposed to another language on the server)? Was it just a preference, or were there some technical reasons?

rootbear 7y ago

I am increasingly seeing "software" used as a discrete noun, rather than as a continuous noun or an adjective, as in this line from the article: "The terminal — a software officially named Bloomberg Professional — is still a major part of Bloomberg’s overall business [...]" I know languages grow and change, but this really grinds on my ears. Not so long ago, the author would have written "a program", or "a software program", or "an application". I see no value in the change.

aetimmes 7y ago
In the HPC world, programs are sometimes referred to as 'codes'. Everyone's nomenclature is a little different.

haileris 7y ago

I've been obsessed with the Bloomberg terminal ever since I discovered my latent love for finance a few years back. I actually got to check one out, but didn't really get to play with it as much as I liked. One day I'll be able to afford the $14k/yr.

barbecue_sauce 7y ago
Can anybody get one as long as they can afford the subscription?
- isaachier 7y ago
  Having worked there, I believe the answer is yes, assuming you aren't living in a country that has an economic sanction against it, etc.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
One trick I heard was to take finance courses at a community college/university that owns a terminal license. Johns Hopkins specifically has a bunch of terminals donated by Bloomberg himself.
swyx 7y ago
let me push you a little harder - why exactly do you feel you want it or need it? i bet i can find you replacements for each individual component. if you aren't institutional, you dont need bloomberg.
divbzero 7y ago
As mentioned in an earlier comment [1] NYPL offers public access to a Bloomberg terminal in their SIBL branch at 34th & Madison [2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847130 [2]: https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl This might be unique to NYC. I’d be curious if other public libraries or institutions offer similar access.
nly 7y ago
Easiest thing for you to do would probably be to take a job there, since all employees get access.

everling 7y ago

I use the terminal in my work. I’ve come to loathe the obtuse UX - every function like PORT or EMSX has its own peculiar design that has to be learned by trial and error. A button named ”cancel” might be placed in a way that would imply closing a window but in reality cancels a trade. The archaic design is a trademark in its own right, so it’ll be around forever it seems.

tptacek 7y ago

Everything I've ever read about BB terminals make them sound like Dwarf Fortress for Finance.

dgudkov 7y ago

Fun fact: Information from the Bloomberg terminal can also be received right into Excel using special VBA functions. Although, there are licensing restrictions on sharing such information.

droitbutch 7y ago

> "And while the terminal can be hard to learn — it’s not very intuitive — once they pick it up, a lot of people don’t want to learn a new tool and run the risk of making a mistake. ... The terminal is sticky." So TLDR: it's vi for traders!