Yeah... people aren't paying Bloomberg $31,980 per year for a TUI. They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
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:<p><pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
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.
I'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.
The terminal is also sort of an app platform for brokers and other firms to sell services to the buy side.<p>A few examples:<p>1. As a researcher, you can develop indexes and portfolios, then make those available to customers via bbg<p>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.<p>3. Many brokers offer automatic trading services like "sell this notional but do it very slowly" etc etc... they do that via bbg
TIL Bloomberg terminal is the original iMessage blue bubbles network
It's funny to think some of the world's largest trades are being done in something that resembles a game's tradechat. (WTS bonds)
Unlocked a core memory for me!<p>Anyone else old enough to remember scripting a tradebot in Asheron's Call?
For a long time fixed income trading took place over AOL Instant Messenger and later Yahoo chat rooms.<p>I am not making this up.<p>There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.
I 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.
That should have been obvious from the mere fact that the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies.
> <i>the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies</i><p>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.
I 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)<p>I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description.<p>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.<p>Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children.<p>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.
> <i>I’m not in the trading world</i><p>I was. Algorithmic derivatives. The rich kids went into banking. Their connections bought deal flow. Those of us from public universities mostly went into trading. It’s why it’s been looked down on within Wall Street since basically ever.<p>> <i>I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children</i><p>Parents buying their kids Bloomberg terminals aren’t looking for them to get into trading, they’re training them to start a hedge fund.<p>(I’d also guess a minority of folks with a BB are traders. It’s really more of a vetted calling card.)
Why would a trader need your consent to make a trade with somebody else?
I assumed they were referring to market crashes caused by irresponsible levels of risks and deceptive practices like we saw in 2008, and/or government-funded bailouts
why should we have financial regulation at all, is that what you're getting at?
"Capitalism bad" is generally their point
often they're trading things with externalities
It’s pretty bad except that any other way is even worse.
I find it interesting that nobody from the finance community is directly speaking about their experience in this thread.<p>What's the equivalent of hacker news for financial folk?
Bloomberg is big enough that different aspects of the system are going to be absolutely key for substantial subsets of its customers.
Hence quips like: "Most customers only use 10% of your features, but every customer uses a <i>different</i> 10%."
Yes its a multi-decade long-tail of thousands and thousands of use cases all used in different combinations by different users.
It'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".
There 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.
Bloomberg 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.<p>The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
> They're paying for the data source<p>Yup.<p>If you want fixed-income data, Bloomberg is the only shop on the street data-wise.<p>If you want other financial data, Bloomberg's fixed entry-point pricing tends to make more sense in terms of bang for buck than its competitors modular price sheets.<p>People saying Bloomberg is just about the chat are simply embarrassing themselves.<p>Look at the price sheets of Eikon, Factset, CapIQ etc. There is no such thing as a cheap "Bloomberg killer".<p>Quality data is expensive. So are the leased-lines it arrives at Bloomberg on. So is the data wrangling architecture.
It's a bit ironic that in a country with <i>free markets</i>, so much of the data that is relevant to modern finance is proprietary and quite expensive.<p>The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.
Bloomberg is also a channel for other data providers. You can access your gas pipeline flow data and index prices, which you buy from SP Global, via Bloomberg, for example. It brings data sources into one place.
This is what is wrong with the world today.
To be fair, I don't see anywhere on this page where they try to suggest that this is competitive with a Bloomberg terminal.
Financial companies are cutting down on the amount associates can bill the firm for a $30 dinner, and the time before they can have the firm pay for a $30 car ride home. They definitely wouldn't pay for Bloomberg if it could be easily replaced.
Bloomberg terminal is only $133/day (assuming 240 work days per year). So, while $32k/yr <i>seems</i> expensive at first glance, given the total annual cost of an analyst or trader, it's not <i>huge</i>. Of course, they'd rather not spend the $32k/yr if they could avoid it, if bloomberg can give you an edge on just one or two trades a year, you come out ahead. So...
Skipping a dinner is not losing you much money.<p>Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Bloomberg, even if there was a viable alternative there is no way anyone is pioneering the switch.
Correct. Also, Bloomberg has messaging for traders that is actually an important network effect in certain domains.
Good thing they're not asking $31,980 per year for it then?
You're paying for direct lines to these firms. It's a big chat/social media platform. Combined with the data and news and you got yourself a hell of a platform
Also, and in addition, the value of the Bloomberg Terminal is not the UI, it is the consistency. You don't pay for an accelerator and a break pedal, you pay for the 100% guarantee to find them in the place >100k people have been trained to find them.
Can't you just use a bunch of agents to extract financial statements from company websites the moment they are published? OK, no insider info but you can still do quick agentic fundamental analysis and decide which companies are interesting.
> They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.<p>We keep seeing hundreds of Bloomberg competitors mimicking the interface and they always forget that the chat (with the connections), data and the newsroom are the reasons why Bloomberg's network effect is close to impossible to break.<p>Using the Bloomberg Terminal is taught very early at colleges for any finance professional, which is how they get them as well.
I think it is more oriented towards retail investors (if anybody) than professional users. In theory it could compete with TradingView?<p>(I’d especially love to see some federated social feature built in!)
Is it still though? I have a few finance friends and they all seem to be on TradingView these days
Are they trading bonds, equities, credit default swaps, options,
, etc in large dollar amounts? “Finance” is pretty broad, Bloomberg is for traders and I-bankers afaict.
Many people pay the Bloomberg Terminal subscription ONLY for the chat. They don't use anything else from it.
does the author claim to be a bloomberg clone?
I mean look at the name... this seems more like a fun quip than a product. I'm over here basking in the glow of dem vibes.
Some of us are just here for the æsthetics! Plus I already have the SEA100 "Centerboard" with chrome accents, and this will help complete the look.
actually a lot of data is not included in the standard bloomberg license and you have to pay extra (mostly passing through to the data vendors) to get access to it.<p>There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.
it's a GUI and a TUI, pay attention to the screenshots