What I love about HN. I read one thing that sounds great and authoritative in a subject that I know nothing about. Just to have someone else rain on the parade! Which point of view is correct? I don't know (so I upvoted both..)
"sounds" being the operative word. Lots of ... lets say 'articulate' people on HN, in general. Current thread excepted.
For added-cost datasets, they're mainly a reseller for a 3rd party data provider and SLAs need to be checked to see what you're getting.
For checking via other sources, this is a minimum in finance. Reconciliation / validation needs to be done at every step something new is introduced, and just for the heck of it usually anyway.
I'm sure you could have better text editing shortcuts (power Sublime/Atom users maybe), or a better keyboard (Dvorak for example), but once people do things a certain way and develop proficiency, it's often tough to change.
While a moat makes it hard to attack it is not always the case that a moat is worth attacking. Just because the target seems weak makes it not valuable. Bloomberg is a private company so numbers are hard to get. What is obvious is that financial services consolidation, the movement to index investment and automated trading makes terminals not a growth market.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/business/dealbook/the-blo... > All service providers for Wall Street, not just Bloomberg, are unusually vulnerable at the moment. The financial industry is in the middle of an aggressive run of cost-cutting as it grapples with new regulations and changes in the markets. A Bloomberg contract, which can be upward of $100 million at larger institutions, is a tempting target to whittle down.
> The number of Bloomberg terminals grew only 1.9 percent, to 325,000, last year. In the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of terminals grew at an average rate of 12 percent each year, with most companies signing on for multiyear contracts.
There may be some demand for cheaper terminals but whether this amounts to enough to build out the expensive data collection organization is far from clear. As may have pointed out quality matters. Opportunities may become larger iff Bloomberg has to cut cost and quality decreases.
I guess you have never really used vi to make such a comparison, same as op has probably never used the Bloomberg Terminal.
Does this exist? I'd love to move more to Vim!
This depends on typist and keyboard; I use Swedish/Finnish keyboard and touch-type, and hitting j four times happens without looking or thinking. Hitting } requires me to lift my right hand from typing position, hold Alt-Gr, press 0, and then go back to typing position.
And yes, typing [\]{|} and so on is inconvenient on my keyboard. I particularly detest the choice of \ over / in MSDOS and Windows path names.
I occasionally use US keyboard layout just to get around these difficulties, but whenever I arrive at some random computer, it will have the local layout.
(This is particularly confusing when going to France or Germany with they AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.)
But there's at least one attempt at a nice remapping for dvorak.
I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sense where that idea comes from.
Why does 'tac' mean "reverse abcd to dcba, line-by-line, on the input stream? Human brevity and wit. and then look at the Bloomberg Terminal and ask "Why does 'OTFN'* mean "empty oil tanks departing ports with a cost modifier proportional to the time left in port and risk of loading delays vs. departure cutoffs?", it's for the same human reasons: someone wanted to type as few letters as possible to get something done, and came up with something that seemed good at the time, and it stuck.
Hacking shows always show us people typing three commands and ending up at the [fictional agency of choice] here. Bloomberg can work magic beyond belief with three commands, and even more amazingly dedicated the HELP button on every keyboard to "press it repeatedly and HELP opens the chat to you", which is maybe the best approach I've ever seen.
* OTFN "Oil The Fuck Now" may or may not exist in Bloomberg Terminal, I sadly do not have access :(
That's not sold
No, given freely away for "protection".
Evil mode off:
I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.
A web search for "24/7 ask-a-librarian" returns a page full of different libraries that always, without end, offer a human being ready to try and help you consult through the world of knowledge. If you're polite, they'll do their best to help.
It's not like Bloomberg, where you can just interrupt your work by hitting HELP and magically get a solution provided. But it is a little-known HELP button for information research.
SHIP Shipping functions menu
VSRC Vessel search
VSTK Vessel capacity data
FLET Aggregated fleet data
FIXS Research daily global tanker fixtures
BFX Baltic freight index
BMAP Generate energy-related maps
I disagree that the information is hard to find. I think a lot of the data is publicly available. Bloomberg "normalizes" it for you and makes it easy and quick to access. As you point out, they have depth and breadth. And that is where the value lies.
Many people have tried to compete with Bloomberg. Millions and millions of dollars have been poured into competitor products. In my opinion, you will never be able to replace Bloomberg. The key, however, is to break up the functionality. Build a better graphing tool, a better chat app, a better financial analysis tool, a data API that plugs into Excel, Python, C++, etc... etc...
Also, the value offering of bbg goes beyond the terminal. For example, Bloomberg sells a lot of their "static" data in daily or hourly file updates (for $100Ks/year). They are the central hub for RFQs and IOIs. They also pour money into machine learning techniques to provide better/faster news. They sell their news firehose for top dollar and people will pay for it.
If you're wondering why the original documents are not more directly machine readable, consider that some of them are published by companies due to regulatory obligations, and those companies would much prefer not to publish the information at all. So making the documents easier to consume is where Bloomberg comes in--because the originators don't want to.
There's lots of financial data available on yahoo, for example, but it's just lousy quality.
http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/THB=X/?p=THB=X
You see the graph on the right, it hovers around 30 USD/THB (that's 30 THB per USD, in somewhat confusing FX convention).
Now click on 5Y, then click on 10Y, and compare. The 10Y graphs probably includes some wrong blip around 700, which is why the 10Y graph scale is from 0 to 750, and you just see a basically flat line displayed at the bottom.
(The 10Y PHP graph is fine, while the 10Y INR graph has a similar issue).
So, if you do any trading strategy where you're trying to figure out whether your current value is relatively high or low by comparing it to the 10Y max and min, you'll most likely be off.
Or consider equity, for example. To properly deal with shares, you first need the trading calendar for every exchange (when is the exchange open and you can make a trade), and the settlement calendar (when will the shares actually be settled). US settlement is typically T+3, Europe T+2, UK Gilts T+1, but all according to certain calendars, naturally. These calendars vary by country, and even exchange and even function (in other words, there might be days when shares at a certain exchange trade, but don't settle, and vice versa).
Bloomberg has all these details - good luck finding it on Yahoo or anywhere else, really.
To get from raw data to data you can use can be a hard, tedious and difficult slog. I agree that it's often undervalued. On the other hand, with Bloomberg you certainly pay for it! :-)
And don't get me started with corporate actions (stock splits, mergers), dividends (some jurisdictions announce gross divs, Australia announces net divs; Korea announces AFTER the ex-date; some shares pay a dividend in a ccy different from the ccy the shares are denominated in, etc.), unscheduled exchange closures (due to terrorism, typhoons, etc.), stamp duty and taxes, 1 week holidays for Chinese New Year that screw up the rate curve (because 1d and 1w LIBOR cover the same period), quanto futures, etc.
2.5 hours in the morning (10:00 to 12:30), 1.5 hours in the afternoon (14:30 to 16:00), who needs more than 4 hours trading a day?
Shame they extended it in 2011.
There is a network effect: all the customers the dealers want to reach are on Bloomberg, so they have to publish on Bloomberg. If someone else comes along and says "publish on my channel too", that's extra work, so probably won't get done.
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.