alt Hacker NewsAsked 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
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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)
I 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?
Bloomberg is big enough that different aspects of the system are going to be absolutely key for substantial subsets of its customers.
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.
The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
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.