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I'd like to understand a bit more about how Bloomberg Terminals are set up from an infrastructure perspective. Apologies if you don't know anything about that,

I'd like to understand a bit more about how Bloomberg Terminals are set up from an infrastructure perspective. Apologies if you don't know anything about that, but the idea that there's just "so much data" that only a Bloomberg Terminal can handle it seems kind of suspect to me. Don't we have other options? Or is this all proprietary?

nly 6y ago
The key their volume though is they don't really have hard latency constraints. Most of the data flowing through the Terminal is still for human eye balls and inaccurate or laggy data is tolerated. It's not a low latency product. They do have an API offering but you're unlikely to find serious trading shops using it except as a backup feed.
cmacleod4 6y ago
Bloomberg operates a group of distributed, redundant data centres with massive compute and network infrastructure to ingest real-time data from every exchange and major market participant in the world, across a huge range of financial asset classes. It then fires the tiny subset of this that you happen to be interested in at any given moment down to your Bloomberg terminal. In addition there is data that only they have because it's generated as a by-product of their trading functionality. If I'm MegaBank Corp and I want to sell e.g. credit default swaps denominated in Norwegian Krone, I can advertise this by feeding my prices for such deals to Bloomberg so potential clients who also have a BB terminal can see them and click a price they like to make a trade. This gives Bloomberg a pool of liquidity/price info that no independent source has access to. So there are very strong network effects. Even if you could spend the billions to duplicate the infrastructure and rewrite all the software required, to actually do the same thing you would also need to replicate all the business relationships with data sources. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer/cat/financial-advisor/etc, but I used to be a developer at Bloomberg :-)
bradj 6y ago
There are lots of industry alternatives to Bloomberg, such as Refinitiv Eikon, FactSet, CapIQ, etc. There is a lot of technical infrastructure required to be able to constantly provide real-time data with no downtime. Also, some data sets are in fact proprietary. For example, Refinitiv has a historical database that can’t be beat by competitors because they were literally the only ones that started recording the data as early as they did. Anyone else who claims to have an equivalent data set just won’t have the same amount to provide.

nly 6y ago

The key their volume though is they don't really have hard latency constraints. Most of the data flowing through the Terminal is still for human eye balls and inaccurate or laggy data is tolerated. It's not a low latency product. They do have an API offering but you're unlikely to find serious trading shops using it except as a backup feed.

cmacleod4 6y ago

Bloomberg operates a group of distributed, redundant data centres with massive compute and network infrastructure to ingest real-time data from every exchange and major market participant in the world, across a huge range of financial asset classes. It then fires the tiny subset of this that you happen to be interested in at any given moment down to your Bloomberg terminal. In addition there is data that only they have because it's generated as a by-product of their trading functionality. If I'm MegaBank Corp and I want to sell e.g. credit default swaps denominated in Norwegian Krone, I can advertise this by feeding my prices for such deals to Bloomberg so potential clients who also have a BB terminal can see them and click a price they like to make a trade. This gives Bloomberg a pool of liquidity/price info that no independent source has access to. So there are very strong network effects. Even if you could spend the billions to duplicate the infrastructure and rewrite all the software required, to actually do the same thing you would also need to replicate all the business relationships with data sources. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer/cat/financial-advisor/etc, but I used to be a developer at Bloomberg :-)

bradj 6y ago

There are lots of industry alternatives to Bloomberg, such as Refinitiv Eikon, FactSet, CapIQ, etc. There is a lot of technical infrastructure required to be able to constantly provide real-time data with no downtime. Also, some data sets are in fact proprietary. For example, Refinitiv has a historical database that can’t be beat by competitors because they were literally the only ones that started recording the data as early as they did. Anyone else who claims to have an equivalent data set just won’t have the same amount to provide.