Funny timing, we are pretty big bloomberg users and just had the Reuters Eikon sales team in. Things bloomberg does well.... - Emsx, they have the largest tra

Funny timing, we are pretty big bloomberg users and just had the Reuters Eikon sales team in. Things bloomberg does well.... - Emsx, they have the largest trading network in the world. If you are able to trade, its free and every broker is hooked up to it. You can be up and running in a few days. - market Data. To get full market data for just the Canadian exchanges is about $15,000/month. With a bloomberg terminal its about $300/month. - excel plugin. You can pull real time data, reference (non changing data like the dividend rate) and historical market data into excel. You can experiment so quickly with the combination of bloomberg and excel. This can't be stated enough. - decent api. You can pull the same data you could from excel into your C++/C# or java app with their api. This also really simplifies prototyping and makes it easy to write the basic infrastructure you need at a a hedge fund. With these three things bloomberg has done something pretty remarkable. They've locked down the lower end market here making it hard for competitors to start from the bottom as the bottom is significantly less profitable now. EDIT as to what Eikon does better than bloomberg, the answer is not much. They have a bit better discover ability for functions due to their auto complete typing being much better than bloomberg. Eikon also ranks analysts predictions and then gives predictions as to how a company will do against its earnings, they tell me their predictive model can be very accurate. Reuters also has reuters news integration which is arguably better than bloomberg's news.