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Asked a dear friend in the finance industry what he thought about Bloomberg. He's the type of guy who uses these systems daily. Mostly paraphrasing: 1) Bloom
by ryukoposting 2mo ago
Asked a dear friend in the finance industry what he thought about Bloomberg. He's the type of guy who uses these systems daily. Mostly paraphrasing:
1) Bloomberg was lightyears ahead of anything else in the pre-internet days, so there's a lot of UI familiarity.
2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
3) Bloomberg is the biggest and best aggregator
This is fascinating to be because I always assumed latency was the key. After all, the only Bloomberg terminal I've ever seen in person was hooked up to its own dedicated fiber drop. It seems like the chat and sheer breadth of data are the differentiators.
- tikhonj 2mo agoBloomberg is big enough that different aspects of the system are going to be absolutely key for substantial subsets of its customers.
- steveBK123 2mo agoYes its a multi-decade long-tail of thousands and thousands of use cases all used in different combinations by different users.
- Terr_ 2mo agoHence quips like: "Most customers only use 10% of your features, but every customer uses a different 10%."
- akk0 2mo agoPtuh, call me back when Bloomberg implements spacebar heating!
- mattnewton 2mo agoTIL Bloomberg terminal is the original iMessage blue bubbles network
- rbanffy 2mo agoAlong with BlackBerry messenger.
- pizzalife 2mo agoIt's funny to think some of the world's largest trades are being done in something that resembles a game's tradechat. (WTS bonds)
- globular-toast 2mo agoI find it a bit less funny. There is this perception that what finance people do is super important and grown up but following a brief stint in the industry I realised it literally is just a game. We used to trade bits of stationery and trading cards for fun at school. They never stopped. The only difference is people who never consented to any of this are paying for it all, especially when it all goes wrong.
- allthetime 2mo agoThat should have been obvious from the mere fact that the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
- allthetime 2mo agoI know a lot of traders from both university and growing up around rich kids. Their parents are invariably very wealthy. They were the ones who had the time and safety net to sit around on computers all the time (like me becoming a programmer) I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description. But exactly zero of the people I know who were raised in either poverty or mediocrity are traders or involved in finance, aside from maybe accounting. Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children. Perhaps things were a bit different decades ago, in the scrappy past, but it feels like most higher earning spheres are closing in around pre-existing wealth.
- NoboruWataya 2mo agoIt's really only a specific subset of traders that need close to zero latency. Many other finance professionals deal on larger timescales so it's not that big a deal. I am more "finance-adjacent" so I don't use Bloomberg personally but have worked on plenty of deals where "time sensitive" means "it has to get done this week. Oh wait, the bank hasn't finished its KYC checks yet. Okay, it definitely has to get done next week. Unless the KYC checks are still ongoing, in which case, for sure gotta get it done by the end of the month".
- bfrink 2mo agoY latency doesn't matter if a human is looking at something. By the time your caveman-speed brain reacts, an FPGA sitting in an Equinix data center has made a hundred trades.
- deadbabe 2mo agoThere is a marketplace on Bloomberg where you can buy and sell interesting stuff you don’t really find anywhere else. Some of it stored in freeports and delivered to your freeport, etc. top tier escorts, etc.
- tecleandor 2mo agoIn freeports? So you mean like art?
- deadbabe 2mo agoMore than just art in freeports.
- dist-epoch 2mo agoBloomberg Terminal is for humans. It takes about 10 clicks to do a stock BUY. your average retail stock trading platform is much quicker, many have 1 click trading. The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
- _fat_santa 2mo agoI've heard the same thing about Bloomberg's chat many years ago. Since everyone you're chatting to also has to fork over ~$30k/yr to use it, there's the implicit assumption that you're talking to a serious person.
- zipy124 2mo agoIt also basically guarantees they are a accredited investor, meaning there are no general solicitation rules to fall afoul of.
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- nose 2mo agoI find it interesting that nobody from the finance community is directly speaking about their experience in this thread. What's the equivalent of hacker news for financial folk?
- RattlesnakeJake 2mo agoApparently it's the Bloomberg chat
- altairprime 2mo agoBloomberg Terminal is that equivalent. Like, imagine if RHEL had an integrated live service TUI and integrated chat messenger system for customers, and you’d get about the same result except for a Linux distribution discussing packages and kernel patches and such, right? And since everyone using it is a paying customer, they can be taken for granted as likely being a serious participant rather than a bot/troll.
- ryukoposting 2mo agoI think they just have the good sense to not talk to us bozos. They don't need us accidentally blogging about something confidential.
- nunez 2mo agoWallstreetoasis used to be it; not sure anymore
- polanyer 2mo agoNuclear Phynance at one point was incredible. Really one of the best forums for any subject I have ever been on. I think it is completely gone now. I have never used bloomberg but my understanding is it has history, network effects and great data. The data is ultimately the problem with any project like this. Data is not cheap for personal use. For redistribution in a commercial product, it is really a huge bottleneck to get anything off the ground. This just looks like the standard , useless, retail trading software IMO.
- pid-1 2mo agoThe terminal is also sort of an app platform for brokers and other firms to sell services to the buy side. A few examples: 1. As a researcher, you can develop indexes and portfolios, then make those available to customers via bbg 2. Goldman has a service that let's you buy equities via SWAPs, if a fund can't hold said equities for regulatory or operational reasons. The whole service is a series of menus within the terminal. 3. Many brokers offer automatic trading services like "sell this notional but do it very slowly" etc etc... they do that via bbg
- nunez 2mo agoUsed to be AIM when that was a thing; I'm pretty sure the HFT folks were singlehandedly keeping it alive