Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?

It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades.

Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don't mean relatively basic info like "What's the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?" or "What's the current CDS spread for Citibank?" that you can easily google for but also stuff like "Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?" and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.

Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).

Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.

I think most of your questions can be answered by realizing that Bloomberg was founded in 1981, and they basically got a monopoly in financial data provision because there were no other options in 1981. That is why they have a custom monitor & keyboard: in the days before the IBM PC, everyone had a custom monitor & keyboard, because these things were not standardized. Bloomberg was a technologist & businessman before he was a politician; his business success gave him the money to run for office, his office doesn't force people to pay for Bloomberg.

The reason they're still a monopoly is because knowing how to navigate a Bloomberg is a critical skill for most finance professionals, and now that they have that skillset, they can be very productive moving around in it. A different (better?) UI would require they re-learn everything, which is not going to happen. And when financial professionals are making half a million a year, paying $24k/year for a terminal so that they can be productive isn't a bad investment.

(Source: have a couple friends at Bloomberg. One is in their UI department, and keeps having his proposals for better UIs shot down for business reasons. Also married a financial professional who had to use a Bloomberg in her days as a bond trader.)

The best way to think about the Bloomberg terminal is a web browser that connects you to a private network. (Bloomberg actually is the largest known private network.) Once connected, you have access to thousands of "web apps" - which Bloomberg users call "functions". Instead of a URL, you use a short 2 to 5 letter mnemonic code for each function, such as "MSG" for email, or "TOP" for top news. These different functions provide all sorts of various functionality - most of them are of course related to financial information. Functions like "CDSW" are for analyzing credit default swaps, "SDLC" gives you supply chain data for different companies, other functions analyze or curate Twitter, others correlate news events with historical stock data, etc. There are also many non-financial functions as well that reflect the "social network" aspect of the Bloomberg terminal, such as "POSH" which is basically a high-end Craigs list, or "DINE" which is a high-end Yelp.

All-in-all, the Bloomberg Terminal is like a private Internet for financial professionals.

* Bloomberg Chat

* It is a well accepted reference. You will often see a screenshot of a bloomberg terminal as "proof" of something

it's everything:

- news articles

- squawk

- economic data releases

- historical and live market data

- asset pricing

- charts and analytics

- click trading

- trade execution and transaction cost analysis

- trade order management and post trade processing

- portfolio and risk management

- alerts

- chat

- mail

- Excel integration

- amazing stuff like DINE<GO>, FLY<GO>, and POSH<GO> (lol)

there's probably a ton more stuff that i don't use and don't know. bloomberg is a mile wide and a mile deep in some areas.

you can get any of these features individually from plenty of service providers in the market. some are less specialized and cheaper and some are more specialized and more expensive. if you don't want to manage fifty different contracts with different service providers bloomberg provides a one-stop shop.

bloomberg is more than just data now. it wants to be absolutely everything that a financial firm needs - front office, middle office, back office.

Interesting read on Bloomberg vs Symphony (through an EU policy lens, but has a lot of details about BBG business model I hadn't read elsewhere) http://www.politico.eu/article/bloomberg-vs-the-banks/

I think Bloomberg is a lot weaker than people realize (in terms of competitive position). It offers a lot of functionality as many threads have pointed out but at any given time, the marginal user utilizes 0.5% of what it does. I sat in fixed income origination for years and the only reason I used it was to find some obscure pricing details which are now available for free elsewhere and to quickly export interest rate curves. Our traders definitely found it mission critical but there were 3 of them and 40 of us. Now if you go to someone within equity-linked securities, they will use it for a variety of different reasons but my friends there admitted they used it for 2-4 discrete pieces of functionality.

I believe one of their great data advantages is access. Buy a terminal and you will now have access to niche email distribution lists that no website sees or crawls with important market data (like fixed income bwics).

I believe it is difficult to attack Bloomberg head on as others are trying (like money.net or Eikon) but relatively easy to build really rich ecosystems in niche places outside of Bloomberg. Have you heard of a company called Intex? Probably not. In the global structured products market they are a monopoly solution generating 100-200mm in top line with 100 employees and 3 sales people. Wildly profitable but try to start something like that without being in structured products for years and you're dead on arrival. No one will give you the data you need.

UCF has a great tutorial video on the Bloomberg terminal. It is an hour and 7 minutes long, but watch it and you will see why it's the standard in finance. The data/news feed is great and UX is optimized for speed, dense display of information, and filtering.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE

An alternative to Bloomberg Terminal, on the research side, is Tiingo, an amazing financial data portal. They ask that if you use it, you pay a minimum of $7 per month, though that is not currently enforced.

It seems as if there's a lot of behind the scenes data aggregation and analytics, which is good. But surely somebody has created a cheap variation on the rest of it? I.e. software with keystrokes to quickly access open financial data? I mean there's nothing to stop someone doing that, getting custom keyboards made, and selling it for a tiny fraction of the price right?

I'd imagine that there are quite a lot of people who fancy trading as something of a hobby but who will never pay for Bloomberg.

Try:

$ apt install wallstreet

$ wallstreet

I created that for Ubuntu, as a follow-on to:

$ apt install hollywood

$ hollywood

Purely for fun. Try it!

Another point - Bloomberg by an large doesn't fail. This isn't some consumer "build fast, break things, and iterate" model. I can remember one time in my two decades using Bloomberg that something broke. For half a day this year the IB chat system went down. The world of finance practically ground to a halt. But that was the wild exception. Compared to most platforms Bloomberg may be a bit archaic but it is rock solid and thats way more important when you have billions on the line in realtime.

I used the Bloomberg terminal until 2010 so things might have changed since then. The breadth of the data is unrivaled as far as I know, enough examples have been given in the comments. Concerning the data quality I do have to object though, in my area of expertise (mutual funds at the time) Bloomberg data was far from perfect and there were better quality data sources available. I dont doubt that they deliver reliable real time quotes from stock exchanges etc.

Excel integration was generally good, at the time I used the Terminal you had however to decide between two types of applications. The original Terminal which is linked to one PC, i.e. can only be accessed from one specific PC at work and not from home, or the 'Bloomberg anywhere' edition, which I believe was launched as some kind of remote application from a browser and could be used at any PC. The issue with the latter option was that it did not offer Excel integration.

I never liked the UI, some windows application with a lot of 'Terminal' baggage from the 1980's. I think they should re-build the whole thing as a browser based application, not replacing the old 'Terminal' application that current users are accustomed to but to on-board new users on a modern platform with a long term migration path to shut down the current application for good. Otherwise they might be replaced by a newcomer eventually...

https://www.money.net/ seems to be such a potential newcomer, especially considering the much more reasonable price point and the use of current technology.

315,000 subscribers paying north of $20,000 per year, as of 2013.[0] Whoa.

[0] https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c...

I asked the finance guys at the asset management firm I worked at last, and they said that the #1 value to them was in the chat. So many deals are arranged via the built-in chat system. News can be acquired from many places, but if you capture the communication (or create the platform, as BB did), then you capture your audience.

It's very hard to break out of that, because doing so means you're now excluded from some of the most useful and important information. Nobody wants to be first to leave, and convincing enough users to leave en masse to create or use an alternative seems impossible at this point.

It's fast in terms of time takes from press release to screen, total news coverage is unrivaled (Reuters you could say maybe), forgot how many trillions of dollars they control all together. bonds they are the king, tradebook, their international financial data is a little rough, and their sales force is relentless. Try to sell me a god damn terminal every time. also they were ahead of pack regarding supply chain data, graph modeling, they are moving into Law.

You are looking at this from a computer engineer's point of view (perhaps). However if you look at it from the world of finance, access to a data broker with up to date(seconds) information where you can also chat with major bank traders and hedge funds the package is very complete.

Data brokers. Not a regular thing in comp.sci, but very much so in the world of finance.

Longtime user of Bloomberg here, both finance and coding experience.

You no longer need special hardware to use the terminal. In fact the special keys are just mappings to your F keys, and you'll know which one is which without the keyboard. They have a sticker strip if you really need it. BTW the keyboard is crap, the buttons aren't balanced meaning the keys kinda stick, making you type slower.

Data is the only reason you need this thing. It's truly comprehensive how many data sources are all accessible through a single syntax. I've traded single stocks, corporate bonds, CDS, ETFs, index options, equity options, commodity futures, government bonds, interest rate swaps, IR swaptions, FX, FX options, and so on. You can get a price chart for all of them just by typing in a code followed by "GP". Or you can get relevant news.

On the API side, it's pretty easy to pull the data you need from the terminal. There's .NET, python, java, etc libraries for you, with lots of examples. And just about every imaginable field is there.

Bloomberg Chat is useful in certain parts of the industry. You can have all your brokers set up with individual 1-on-1 chats, yet still blast out a quote request as in "USD 5Y, 100K dv01, please" and they will all see it without knowing how many people you're talking to. A lot of people are still trading in the stone age, and Bloomberg is certified for keeping records for this sort of thing. You might have heard about BBG Chat in the recent LIBOR trials.

There's also a whole pseudo-exchange functionality. Basically you can get approved to get prices from each broker, and then you can trade with them by sending them tickets via Bloomberg. I always thought that was crap, but some people like it, depends on their niche.

It's kinda ripe for disruption though. 24K is a lot for the basic package, and if you want to actually get the data, rather than just the interface into it, you have to pay the underlying provider. That gets pricy quite quickly. Also live data costs money, too, and it's not going to be fast. Unless you get the leased line (if you're in the City of London, it's not a problem), which is more money again. And not especially fast, since there's an extra hop. I'm not sure I buy the argument that finance professionals know how to use it, so bbg is entrenched. If you understand what you're looking for, you're not going to have a problem finding it on some other system. For a lot of things such as common stocks, Yahoo and Google are not going to have any less information.

I've never thought highly of bloomberg's customer service. At most they're useful for discovering functions that you don't know the shortcut for. When there's anything remotely complicated, they seem to do a huge internal goose chase and then eventually get back to you with "can't do it". Basically anything API related, the Help Help guys will not know what to do and end up waiting for a dev. Also the official account manager keeps changing and every time you get a new one they pester you to show you some obscure functionality.

Bloomberg (the company) became the de facto standard in the financial industry decades before Mike Bloomberg became a politician.

Mike Bloomberg started the company because while working at Merrill Lynch (in the 80ies) he thought the computer terminals banks used at the time to see stock and bond prices where ridiculous. He got funded by Merrill Lynch and disrupted the industry, overtaking rivals like Reuters (which well into the 90ies was usually considered the most trustworthy source for stock data)

You needed their special hardware only until the late nineties (the "Bloomberg box" - consider that up until around 96 or 97, only few employees would have internet access on their desktop, even inside "bulge bracket" investment banks): nowadays, you can get Blooomberg terminal on their workstation or on your own hardware. Likewise, you can run in on a dedicated connection, or on your normal internet line.

The key element of Bloomberg terminal is reliability: it feeds data you can usually trust and price feeds you can almost certainly trust. When you are checking prices changing several times a second across exchanges in different part of the world that's no easy feat). That's crucial when millions of dollars are at stake.

Second is the ability to access 80% of the data and information you would ever want to check wihout leaving the terminal.

Third ingredient is ease of use.

Fourth is incredible customer service.

Fifth is innovation: they continuously innovate, improve old features, add new features, introduce access to new data/information.

Once you remove the cost of the underlying live price feeds (from stock exchanges), The Bloomberg terminal is not that expensive for what it does. Bear in mind its customers are people that spend their day optimizing their financial decisions: if there was something cheaper working as well, they would go for it. If there was something working even better, they would go for it, probably even at a higher price point (because that's how the economics in the banking and investing world work).

Fun read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-blo...

Bloomberg has a massive network effect which makes it difficult to displace. Particularly when you move away from exchange traded products like equities and into areas like corporate fixed income, interactions are still conducted via bilateral discussion (i.e., online chat and text price dissemination). To be in the game you need to be where everyone else is talking. There is an ecosystem of price scraping and trade processing in Bloomberg which facilitates the whole trade and portfolio management process. I can route orders via Bloomberg to any broker and monitor execution of my orders in real-time. No the costs are not cheap but it is a lot cheaper than hiring several members of an operations team which would be necessary if this was all done manually.

Bloomberg is also like an operating system. For example, there are electronic execution venues in many types of instruments which use the Bloomberg as their front-end. This is very valuable. When you are a trader, screen real estate is critical. You can have 6 30" monitors and it still isn't enough if your tools are fragmented across 50 platforms. The more you can keep things integrated into a few core tools the better.

You are also paying a ton for ultra-responsive service. When millions or billions are on the line you don't have time to mess around on a help-line. On a Bloomberg you have 24-7 ultra-responsive skilled help who are responsive in around 30 seconds.

There are other reasons but end of the day if you are a pro then 30k/year isn't cheap but its a lot cheaper than trying to hack around with amateur tools.

Well, the monopoly aspect has had a limiting effect on a few things I've been involved in, at least in government/quasi-government. Given that some data series I've used are only (? or most conveniently) available through the terminal, it has meant having only half-automated tools. You always still need to do a weekly walk down the hall to a terminal followed by a lengthy boot-up on an old box, entering of password, opening of spreadsheet. They tend to lock down those machines too.

While I guess there are APIs, I don't get the impression they're easy to just integrate into any old workflow if the terminal is down the hall or even on the other side of your desk. It's all linked to that terminal, no? Pretty annoying if you ask me, from a programmers standpoint. Not to mention another case of closed, proprietary tech in the financial sector.

Wow, great comments about Bloomberg. It makes me wonder, is there similar system for Cryptocoins traders?

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It's a good question. There are many reasons - and I don't think the speed of information is the real one. I almost left a single word response - "chat" - but think it is more complicated.

Another aspect is trust. If you are trading billions you want the information/trade data "currency" everyone else uses. I built backends converting MBS bid to yield and if it wasn't tuned to a 1/16 or better of Bloomberg, it wasn't usable.

Bloomberg also offers custom studies like "fear/greed" which may have some value.

TR/Thompson Reuters also has a competitive product for much less and you can't really go wrong with either for 99% of use cases.

There are also many stand alone news sources you could use. Benzinga comes to mind as one example.

Interesting note - Bloomberg is highly protective of their IP and has been know to write takedown notices of screenshots posted online.

// built 2 SaaS Fintech systems

- the custom keyboard may have been a holdover from the early versions of Bloomberg, today its not as useful. I personally think the key response on it is terrible. So I actually just keep it plugged in for the fingerprint scanner.

- bbg is about quick access to data. Most of the data is publicly available. But if you serve it up super quick and consistently, people value that

- the chat application is what the vast majority of people pay for, IMHO. This gives you access to most other people in your industry or product group. This is how business is conducted. - bbg has an army of people backing their product.. from the bbg help to data cleaners. This ensures quality for the high price you're paying

I used to work for Bloomberg. They bring together countless data feeds, analytical tools, some analysis and news into one central location. They pump a lot of money into these data capturing efforts. They hire hoards of data capturing grunts to trawl the web for renewable energy projects and heavens knows how many more to process financial statements.

I suppose at the end of the day even though they do all this I'm not 100% sure they do it very well. I don't use the terminal or claim to know how, but it seems to have have become an essential tool for many people in the finance industry.

Although after all that I know there is a joke going around that the main reason most people fork out for the terminal is for the chat functionality.

Symphony was marketed by Goldman Sachs and Blackrock as a $15 Bloomberg killer, but still has not gained much traction. Bloomberg provides real-time data feeds, analysis tools, real-time secure communication with other traders, news and entertainment. When you are looking after AUMs of tens or hundreds of billions, $24,000 a year for a Bloomberg subscription is negligible.

"Potential users don’t want to get onboard unless all the other people in their ecosystem are on the service. That dynamic obviously keeps most people from joining Symphony. Most everyone working in financial markets is already on Bloomberg, and it would take virtually everyone leaving at the same time to give Symphony critical mass.

“I think Facebook is the best comparison,” Ayzerov says. “If Facebook had only one fourth of your friends, you wouldn’t use it. The advantage of Bloomberg is that every financial person has it.”"

See http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3572874/banking... for some of the obstacles that Symphony faces

"BMAP is the coolest.

Pulls up a global map with "near-realtime" locations of cargo ships, offshore oil derricks and wind farms, tropical depressions and hurricanes, uranium mines, all kinds of crazy stuff.

You can zoom in on the Panama Canal and see which oil tankers under whose flag are waiting in line to pass through, where they're going and how much oil they're carrying.

You can sort the world's ocean-going cargo vessels by commodity, to see where all the orange juice is."

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloo...

It's more than news. It also provides real-time financial data, access to trading, and a way to securely communicate with other traders.

You can find some background here on what it does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal

The terminal is the 'last-mile' endpoint in a centralized system that delivers real-time data to subscribers with low latency and actually allows them to take action on data. Low latency is what sets it apart from closest competitors such as Reuters.

The ability to trade is perhaps no so important these days given the advent of algo trading/stat arb, but it serves to emphasize the point that there is more to the terminal than just viewing the data.

It is pretty simple: network effects.

Nearly every trader, sales person, and investment manager in finance has a bloomberg terminal which is guaranteed to own a lot of screen real estate on their monitors. If you need to get in touch with someone as quickly and efficiently as possible, bloomberg chat is the way to go. You are usually involved in multiple conversations at once so phones just don't cut it.

I traded two different products that were almost exclusively traded via IB (chat) or MSG (email like). There is nothing special about either of those communication channels, but market norms are incredibly powerful.

As others are mentioning, Bloomberg also centralizes a ton of different data, but this much easier to replicate than the network effects of the products above.

I think it has very little to do with the end-user hardware, and everything to do with their data. Bloomberg is dominant in data quality. Really, whatever financial information you want, you can get, provided you're willing and able to pay the price.

Their data is faster and cleaner than most of their competition. Personally, I find their interface clunky by today's standards, but it's entrenched in the industry, so there's a non-trivial learning "cost" for anyone considering switching away, and even if they're able to adapt to a new interface, they're likely to find holes in the available data. Beyond their data, they connect the financial industry over Bloomberg chat, so it's got the network effect there. The hardware itself is not a huge factor IMO. Plenty of people use Bloomberg terminals, via Bloomberg Anywhere, logging in from their standard desktop with their normal Windows keyboards.

It's like Emacs or VIM for financial market professionals.

There are some good answers here about why BBG has become the de facto information tool for folks who work in finance. Speaking as someone who works in finance -- there are, in my opinion, opportunities to dethrone BBG, but the most effective attack vectors will be more niche markets where information can be easily digitized, organized, and presented in a way that beats BBG's interface.

I work with municipal bonds - long story short, the muni market is a fixed income market with several legal and structural characteristics which add complexity over the corporate and government bond markets.

For example - generally municipal bonds are structured with serial maturities and a 10 year par call option, which means issuers are constantly refinancing, paying bonds down with cash, etc. This introduces complexity around even knowing what bonds an issuer still has outstanding. To someone who works with corporates, you'd just pull up the ticker and immediately see what's there - for our market, it takes a lot of manual effort to track the bonds, digitize old documents, and present that information in a logical interface.

(Similar to the SEC's EDGAR, there is an information repository for the municipal market called EMMA, which was introduced post-crisis - so it is fairly easy to pull recent disclosures, but very difficult to track older bonds/documents.)

On the investment banking side, we have one Bloomberg terminal for our entire floor, since the subscription is fairly expensive and we don't have as much need for the info as the traders do. If a company were to simply track information about municipal bonds, starting with the largest issuers, they could undercut Bloomberg in this market and make a good chunk of subscription revenue.

I have to imagine these opportunities exist elsewhere as well. I doubt that there are many folks who use BBG functions for more than the handful of markets in which they participate. I bet that there are markets where smaller companies could do just as good a job as BBG at gathering information for a lower cost.

A thought I just had while typing this comment - to me, BBG seems analogous to a cable TV bundle, where you pay for a ton of channels that you don't use. I wonder if competing against BBG in single markets would motivate them to introduce tiered/a la carte subscription models? The one feature keeping everyone on Bloomberg is chat (and to a certain extent, the actual trading platform) - in my case, if we could have that while only subscribing to a few functions, that would probably be enough for us and could save on subscription costs.

Network effects especially for the chat function. Most of other functions are easily replicated by by Reuters Thompson, one of Bloomberg's competitors.

I think there are a few reasons that keeps them at the top of the heap vs. their nearest competitors (S&P CapIQ, Factset, Thompson/Reuters).

One if Mike Bloomberg himself. He is a rarity. He is a founder who is still very active in the company. He certainly doesn't need to go to work every day for the money. He is worth billions and is 75. I think he genuinely loves the work and he demands the same work ethic from those around him. I would imagine that when he is in the building, you can "feel" it in the air. That gravitas that was frequently on display when he was mayor of NYC is probably there every day whenever he holds court on a topic.

Second, I believe Bloomberg has grown organically. I think it's much easier to present a complete and consistent system when you've built most of it yourself. A company like TR has been built up through acquisitions and it at times shows in the product. Factset has adopted a similar strategy as of late.

Third, while the product at times has a distinctive UI/UX experience, it has always seemed super fast at least to my eyes. Less is true of their competitors.

Point of clarification: Bloomberg does not require special hardware to use, though they do offer special hardware that integrates well with the software. At the time I left finance, I used a regular off-the-shelf PC with Dell monitors and a Das Keyboard, and it ran all the software I used on a daily basis (Bloomberg, Office, etc.).

You've had lots of answers but I have a few other points that are worthy to mention...

The #1 key / function on a Bloomberg terminal is the Message key. Just like people are on Facebook because other people are on FB and not MySpace is the driver behind BB's message function. Bloomberg messages are key for relationship maintenance and informal (or even semi-formal) information exchange.

BB is a little hard to learn how to use because of all the special keys and function short codes. But because of those special keys and functions, once you are trained, the system is blazing fast to operate. Blazing fast in a trading environment is especially important to grumpy trading staff.

Which gets us to deal capture... so with the BB messaging system being so popular and in the early days being used to talk about deals, Bloomberg created a deal capture element to the system. So in addition to chatting with your street counterpart, you could formally confirm the deal you just messaged with your buddy. So take the social, add the deal capture, and add the fast & reliable, you have a damn good vanilla dealing system with zero overhead beyond monthly terminal cost, which you are paying anyway.

Unlike Reuters market data client-side infrastructure, BB terminal implementation requires low technical knowledge. Leased line and a black box communications server and bango you are up and running. Reuters, you need multiple Unix servers, so you need a Unix admin plus 1 more guy in case Unix admin #1 goes on holiday, plus leased lines, plus the comms equipment, plus this and plus that.

My old firm had 1 employee dedicated to untangling Reuters bills as there were user costs, systems as data user costs, depreciation costs, real time data costs, blah blah blah. Reuters billing had elements of self-auditing and internal real time data subscription management. BB bills are a list of BB terminal IDs which are easily mapped to user X and department Y. BB real time data feed costs are tied to specific user. You could process a Bloomberg invoice in 30 minutes with a temp staff.

You are not paying for the hardware, you're paying for the platform and data. The monitor is a regular monitor (and I think it's only marginally used). The keyboard has a few extra keys which are convenient but not absolutely required (you can also use Bloomberg on a laptop).

Basically, there isn't just "news" as in stories -- there's tons of data that's annoying, hard or impossible to find without paying various parties for it and scraping it, which Bloomberg makes available in one place, sorted and sortable and searchable, and possible to import automatically into Excel. Eg., it's the most reliable source of dates, times, and data content for upcoming and past macroeconomic announcements and earnings announcements; you can fetch stock index components with their current weights in the basket; and you can graph all sorts of things against each other using their powerful graphing software.

Chat. In other words: whoever matters is accessible through it. It's an integrated platform for trading that also includes 'social', you can do every bit of your workflow there -- communication, sales, research, trade.

I worked there for quite a while. I'll try to address some of your specific questions directly.

> it's just a portal that gives the news

A portal? Bloomberg News has its very own reporters (and jourobots). They investigate and write original content. People usually don't buy the terminal (~2000 USD/month) only for that, but if they do, they can read everything directly in the terminal.

> What I don't get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard?

The monitor is, these days, only about branding. Ten to fifteen years ago, Bloomberg offered good-quality LCD screens with integrated mounting arms for 2 or 4, at a time when that was a pretty high-end setup. As LCD screens became cheap and ubiquitous, many users don't have the Bloomberg ones, but they still have the Bloomberg keyboard. It's useful because it has special labels for a few hotkeys, plus some of them have extras like fingerprint readers. If you lack the special keyboard you can press Alt+K on any keyboard and the terminal will show you a graphic of the special keys for reference.

But to really understand why they have a special keyboard, you need to look back a good long while. That's covered here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-blo... - the gist is that a "Bloomberg terminal" used to be a real terminal, connected to a magic box on the customer premises (which served several terminals). There have been many, many iterations of the terminal hardware, from a dedicated proprietary box, to software running on Sparc workstations, to software running on Windows, with the keyboard becoming more like a PC keyboard around the turn of the century.

> is it a VPN

No. Traditionally, customers connect their terminals back to the Bloomberg service via leased lines (i.e. not the internet). But for many years now you have the option of using the internet, though not everyone wants that.

> The cost of the product is ridiculous.

The cost of the product is much less than what some customers would be willing to pay. Most customers pay about the same monthly fee, regardless of where they are in the world, regardless of their corporate income statement, etc. So yes, it seems expensive to people who wouldn't get that much out of it. Some schools get a discount.

> Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware?

Bloomberg does not require specialized hardware at all. You can install it on any Windows laptop, and you are more than welcome to do so. As for cheaper--yes, there are lots of things which are cheaper, but you will be hard-pressed to find any combination of those which is still cheaper and yet does most of what Bloomberg does (i.e. has similar quantity and quality of data, and applications built up).

> I know Bloomberg is a politician

He is now, but he was not when his company went from 0 users to 100,000 users.

It's got a network-effect moat. The terminal isn't just a way to get information. It's a communication platform for members of the financial industry. And all the people they want to talk to are already there.

The most important thing is it's ubiquitous in Finance. If everyone has it, it's very hard for someone else to introduce a competitor that others don't have.

It's also got an interface that everyone is used to. Not a great interface, but one that everyone knows.

There are cheaper alternatives, as well as easier to use alternatives, and alternatives with better analytics. But in general they just layer above BBG, they don't replace it.

This podcast will shed some light on your query: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/podcast-wall-streets-just...

“Bloomberg just wants you to be locked into the ecosystem and never, ever leave. It’s like the Hotel California of financial data.” — Robin Wigglesworth

The depth and breadth of financial data along with excellent integration with Excel is simply unmatched! I actually looked into alternatives a couple of times and each time didn't find anything even close! There're a lot of rivals though including Factset that have great products but nothing really comes close to Bloomberg especially if you have to work with FI instruments.

Things might be different now, but Bloomberg used to be unique in what it offered:fixed income price feeds, analytics, news feeds and messaging service for market participants.

Another killer feature was that there were addins to excel spreadsheets.

Now, there are probably competing products, but Bloomberg has a large user base who are very familiar with its product.

Dealers need bbg, the social network in bbg chat drives some network effects, there's also a bit of tradition involved too. They tend to have less data issues than most but there's plenty still there.

Analysts and research roles aren't so beholden but bbg does data well while reuters does news well.

My friends at Intrinio (https://intrinio.com/) here in St. Pete FL are responding to this question with a lower-cost, developer-friendly way to pull financial data into Excel, Google Sheets or your own application.

i think it's a locked down software system that provides near real time data on in various financial markets around the world. the reason why this is useful is alot of stock info you find online is 5 -15 minutes old.. which is kind of useless if you need to buy and sell in realtime.

I'm a quant developer and have had Bloomberg terminal for years. Bloomberg has a lot of different benefits.

1. It is a all-in-one news source. There are a lot of features that allow you to monitor the news from many different sources in real time.

2. It is a social network. The built-in chat and email service is _really_ basic. But, just about every one working in Finance is on it, with their contact details and resumes. As a trader, you can legally close financial transactions on the Bloomberg chat, as one would over the phone.

3. It is a data sharing platform. Banks and other market participants contribute to Bloomberg data by sending information that is normally not visible in the market. For instance FX volatilities are quoted by banks on bloomberg in real time. This information is only available in few places.

4. It is an API that allows its users to use its data for custom analytics.

5. It is an execution platform, where you can book trades, follow their values and risk when the market moves, etc.

6. It is open to 3rd parties: some banks and other data vendors have their own pages on bloomberg (which I never had access to).

7. It has many many other stuffs. There is a restaurant review system. There is a classified section. There are things to monitor the weather. It has videos, maps, it's just huge.

Now - that is what people are interested in.

And then there are the things that Bloomberg shoves down your throat. Like the keyboard.

Bloomberg _forces_ you to buy their keyboards, at a very heavy price. The justification is the fingerprint reader, but that's really just a scam, because they put a $10 fingerprint reader onto a $10 keyboard, and sell you the thing at $500 a piece. So you either need to buy the keyboard, or you need to buy the B-Unit, which is Bloomberg very 2-factor authentication device which I assume is also quite expensive.

There is also the additional price you pay for API access, or to be able to see very specialized data. You pay for your private circuit to their servers (yep, it usually doesn't go through the internet).

Also a few words on the UI: it is f-ing terrible. Hit Escape, and you will find yourself on the start page. It doesn't matter that you were in the middle of typing an email or pricing a product, it just restarts your terminal. Most of the features are accessed by obscure four letter codes, that one has to learn to go back to. There is a search feature but everything is mixed in, and so you have to be pretty lucky to find anything useful using that. After a while though, the fact that the UI is so bad makes you feel "part of the club", I think many people would hate it if it changed.

It's not the terminal pet se, it's the information it is connected to.

Does anyone here know how difficult it would be for BBL to change their GUI? I am using the terminal quite often, but I wish it would be more EIKON like.

It's not mostly news, it's mostly finance data that only Bloomberg has aggregated. To get the data you have to buy the terminal.

Is it possible to access the bloomberg terminal chat via some sort of api?