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Not the least because most of those data sources require a license. Also they have huge amount of economic data, company financials, all somewhat normalised. T

by cm2187 5y ago

Not the least because most of those data sources require a license. Also they have huge amount of economic data, company financials, all somewhat normalised. That’s costly to maintain as I presume it comes from hundreds of different sources. Because these things break all the time. Broken feeds with wrong prices get sent, which require to reload the history when it gets corrected. A lot of google finance price feeds were broken and stayed broken for months They also integrate with trading desks, for instance who send bond pricing runs to their clients via bloomberg. The more banks you are client of, the more reliable your prices in bbg. There also have quasi proprietary data, like the key terms of pretty much every bond issued in the world, that the issuers or book runners typically double check when they issue a new one. They create generic time series of on the run bond benchmarks, n-th future (which switched automatically when the future rolls), etc. I am all for competition but agree, steep hill.

qsi 5y ago
I'll just pile on here. The functionality of the Terminal is seemingly infinite and goes way beyond market data. Although it is obviously very good at market data. You pull up a bond, or future, or stock, or index, type FLDS and see an amazing amount of data beyond just the price. It has maps (ships, refineries, fires, earthquakes, etc), flight schedules, overviews, top/bottom lists, correlations, regressions... ad nauseam. And also a quant platform, where you can code in Python I think, but I've never used it. I've been using for longer than I can remember and it's still impressive. Also, they have generally a good to excellent help desk. Hit F1 twice and you're chatting to a real person, who can either help you or direct you to someone else who can. They have let me down on occasion too, but compared to other help desks/support, BB is the best. I am starting to see more latency in pulling up functions in the Terminal, so I hope they're not losing sight of the UX. Near-instance response used to be commonplace, now I find that even some very common screens like WEI take noticeable time to load. It is expensive. Many competitors have come and gone, and the closest thing now is I think Eikon, which also have installed to access the old Datastream data, and it's a complex monstrosity. FactSet is another one but I haven't used it in a long time. Every time cost-cutting time comes, one of the first questions is, "Do you really need Bloomberg?" Well, yes, I do. Also don't forget about how deeply integrated BB is at many companies. Not just spreadsheets, but entire applications using the API. So good luck, but I don't see it happening.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  > Also, they have generally a good to excellent help desk. I found they were good for ordinary "where do I find this function" type queries, useless for anything to do with APIs ("how does this call work") or data questions ("did you backdate this dataset").
  - qsi 5y ago
    The helpdesk explicitly doesn't support API questions, only for the Excel functions. I phrase my API questions to match in Excel BDP terms, that usually works. Data questions can indeed be difficult to get answered.
    - h1srf 5y ago
      I have had pretty good experience with their API support. Generally, if we include our sales rep they will hunt down the right team to get our questions answered if we get the runaround the first time around. The places I've been at do spend a ton of money on terminal + other data licenses though.
- pxmpxm 5y ago
  "amazing amount of data beyond" COKPMON Index is probably my fave in that department, you never know when you'll need to correlate something to the monthly kidnapping rate in Colombia
NickRandom 5y ago
[Edit to update - Sorry, the link quote is/was from a different nick <cmacleod4> not yourself. My bad] Just wanted to say - I loved a previous comment that included this - "... 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 :-) " [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261167

by cm2187 5y ago

qsi 5y ago

I'll just pile on here. The functionality of the Terminal is seemingly infinite and goes way beyond market data. Although it is obviously very good at market data. You pull up a bond, or future, or stock, or index, type FLDS and see an amazing amount of data beyond just the price. It has maps (ships, refineries, fires, earthquakes, etc), flight schedules, overviews, top/bottom lists, correlations, regressions... ad nauseam. And also a quant platform, where you can code in Python I think, but I've never used it. I've been using for longer than I can remember and it's still impressive. Also, they have generally a good to excellent help desk. Hit F1 twice and you're chatting to a real person, who can either help you or direct you to someone else who can. They have let me down on occasion too, but compared to other help desks/support, BB is the best. I am starting to see more latency in pulling up functions in the Terminal, so I hope they're not losing sight of the UX. Near-instance response used to be commonplace, now I find that even some very common screens like WEI take noticeable time to load. It is expensive. Many competitors have come and gone, and the closest thing now is I think Eikon, which also have installed to access the old Datastream data, and it's a complex monstrosity. FactSet is another one but I haven't used it in a long time. Every time cost-cutting time comes, one of the first questions is, "Do you really need Bloomberg?" Well, yes, I do. Also don't forget about how deeply integrated BB is at many companies. Not just spreadsheets, but entire applications using the API. So good luck, but I don't see it happening.

lordnacho 5y ago
> Also, they have generally a good to excellent help desk. I found they were good for ordinary "where do I find this function" type queries, useless for anything to do with APIs ("how does this call work") or data questions ("did you backdate this dataset").
- qsi 5y ago
  The helpdesk explicitly doesn't support API questions, only for the Excel functions. I phrase my API questions to match in Excel BDP terms, that usually works. Data questions can indeed be difficult to get answered.
  - h1srf 5y ago
    I have had pretty good experience with their API support. Generally, if we include our sales rep they will hunt down the right team to get our questions answered if we get the runaround the first time around. The places I've been at do spend a ton of money on terminal + other data licenses though.
pxmpxm 5y ago
"amazing amount of data beyond" COKPMON Index is probably my fave in that department, you never know when you'll need to correlate something to the monthly kidnapping rate in Colombia

NickRandom 5y ago

[Edit to update - Sorry, the link quote is/was from a different nick <cmacleod4> not yourself. My bad] Just wanted to say - I loved a previous comment that included this - "... 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 :-) " [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26261167