This wasn’t the author’s big point, but it did hit me when he said “this isn’t what we usually aspire to, but it works well for prototypes”. It captures how I feel about vibe coding - you can deal with incredibly complex tasks! But, boy, am I not about to use (say) an AI produced GPU driver on a daily basis! Perhaps we should normalize (again) “you’ll throw away your first attempt”.
I know it's impossible, but I've always loved to get a hands-on demo... I'd love to learn the UI patterns involved, for example. I can always make my Emacs faster to interact with, dammit!
I had occasional access to a Bloomberg terminal 20 years ago and I still miss it. I miss it a lot. I wish they offered a cheaper option for users who only need to use it infrequently. I mean, $25,000 annually is brutal if you're not a broker-dealer.
What does the terminal really give you that you can't get from various other data sources scattered around the Internet, like your brokerage's own API, third-party data sources, various forums and subreddits, ...? Is it just the real-time firehose nature of the thing?
- an email address (firstname.lastname@bloomberg.net) used to email and chat
with other professionals on the Bloomberg network. This is like LinkedIn and
WhatsApp combined for people in finance, and people can keep the address for
two years after e.g. losing a job, so they can use the network to find a new
role.
- analytical software: tools to calculate various KPIs to assess and analyze business opportunities.
- capability to transact: The BB terminal is not just an information system, it also permits you to buy and sell directly.
(My university has one BB terminal that MBA students can access and get training on.)
It's all that and much more. It has an enormous amount of data of all kinds that could be vaguely relevant in finance. BMAP can show you vessels (AIS data), location of LNG terminals, powerplants, bank branches, crop yield forecasts (just a few I picked off the list just now) and so much more on an interactive world map.
And every kind of price you can think of (almost). Crack spreads? River levels? Baseload power? Airline schedules? I am trying to think of more but it's truly VAST.
They have custom screens, configurable screens, custom settings (you want the generic futures contract to be rolled differently from the default? Sure...), option pricers and stuff I have never had to search for or look at.
They also have their own query language BQL for data queries and the BQNT platform is Python-based and optimized for use with the data.
If you just want the latest stock prices for your portfolio your online brokerage app probably does a better job.
The biggest miss right now is their ASKB AI chatbot, which is borderline moronic. It has to be some older model with low thinking/effort, because the first answer it gives is always broken in some way. Hallucinated functions or fields, outright wrong descriptions, etc. I don't even try to use the first answer anymore but ask it again to check its previous answer against verified and authoritative sources/documentation and will come up with many corrections. And then I do it again, and maybe a fourth time.
> I don't even try to use the first answer anymore but ask it again to check its previous answer against verified and authoritative sources/documentation and will come up with many corrections. And then I do it again, and maybe a fourth time.
Maybe all they need to show massive improvement is a for loop of four iterations with the loop body being "are you sure, check the docs?" and return the result at the end.
I've heard many people quip that the best thing about using a $25000 terminal is being connected to other people who can afford spending $25000 on a terminal.
You hit HELP HELP (a dedicated button on the keyboard) and a real, knowledgeable person in your time zone will _fix_ any problem with the data you see on your screen. If it's not fixed by the time their day ends, they will hand your ticket to yet another knowledgable person to the west who will continue working on it to fix it. That is, the data quality, and the data quality processes, are a large part of what you pay for. People get hung up about real time, but what if a number on a financial statement from 10 years ago is screwing up your model training?
> Imagine that your ISP (connectivity), browser (interface), OS (orchestration), app store (functionality), search engine (directory), social network (chat), and media houses (news & data) were all run and owned by a single company.
That's called vertical integration, not an anti-trust violation.
It could be if they were the only one trying to offer this, but because it's so expensive, there are always multiple competitors trying to pick off their users. And when the next round of corporate cost cutting comes, they always come for the Bloomberg terminals, trying to push something cheaper.
But the cheaper alternatives are always inferior too (never mind the decades of muscle memory on Bloomberg).
Despite the price Bloomberg has maintained its number one position. I think in no small part that's also because their customer support is absolutely excellent. Press F1 twice and you're in a chat with the helpdesk; these days the initial query is triaged by AI of course, but for actual issues you're talking to a real human in less than a minute (sometimes just seconds), and these real actual humans typically have the expertise to help you. If not, the higher levels of support are good too. Don't underestimate this aspect!
Yeah, my reply’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don’t really oppose monopolies per se – it’s a free market, a better product could compete and win.
But one of the Bloomberg’s main selling points, at least from the last discussion I’ve read on HN (and some of the comments here too), is the chat, which means there’s network effects at play. So you can’t just build a better terminal, you also have to convince the majority to switch.
(Though apparently Bloomberg Chat also supports email? Maybe the competitor can use that to interface with it, so it’s only “green bubble” bad, not “all your colleagues are there and you’re not” bad.)
Ah, I see and didn't pick up on the tongue-in-cheekness!
The network effect is real and I don't think you can interface external email with it. You do get a Bloomberg email address as a user but I've never seen anyone in a chat with an external email only.
Maybe it's because of all the integration that's hard to do. A bit like if Windows 98 was inseparable from Internet Explorer, so you couldn't just replace one or the other.
"Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg terminal".
Next week it will be in Bloomberg Business Week, long after it had trading value.
Bloomberg has its own news collection and analysis operation, bigger than almost all US newspapers.
For many years ending around, a Bloomberg BusinessWeek paper magazine subscription was an incredible bargain. It was often possible (through tons of discount magazine sites) to get it for like $25 a year or less, and you could link that subscription online to get access to a lot of Bloomberg.com articles. Far from Terminal access of course, but I still really enjoyed the in-depth journalism and analysis. Around 2020 or so they pulled it off that type of distribution, now it's $100 a year and doesn't come with any online access other than the magazine articles themselves. And the full subscription to digital is $400 a year. It's priced just high enough to make it hard to justify for those who aren't real finance professionals. I really miss Bloomberg since the hard paywall went up.
As for the $400 a year, for years I'd cancel before the end of the subscription, ignore them for 2 weeks, and get a great offer for the next year. I haven't done it this year, though, forgot to set a reminder.
Great value anyway. One of the only news sources focused on facts and meaningful stuff. Its been my go to news source for at least 15 years. I don't work in finance.
That's the default. You can get real-time feeds for pretty much anything if you pay extra for it. That also really adds up BTW so only our traders tend to be permissioned for real time data.
Its breadth and depth - it’s about being able to see a forward for ISONE Vermont Pk power prices, swaptions on uk gilts, where 5yr forwards are pricing for the yen, freight rates and ship tracking, weather data, satellite analysis, legal and legislative data etc.
From what I have seen of it - for the people who can afford it I suspect that having everything all in one place under a common UI is a bit of an enabler.
Reducing the friction or feedback loop of information retrieval/analysis can change how people work just like repls and hotreloading did vs slow and long compiles
Some markets, for example, corporate bonds, are mostly on BB chat. They are dealer markets. And dealers will provide “runs” of prices on chat. List of 200 bonds and their prices.
So if you want to trade bonds, need BB as that is where it is happening. Keep in mind some of these bonds trade infrequently (sometimes few times a month).
Having said that, there are more and more bonds trading electronically all the time.
The article has an image of terminal keyboard used by a legendary trader... the key-caps are immaculate; the letters haven't faded at all. Amazing. I wonder if they were double-shot...
On one hand, at the price point of >$10000 for the whole terminal, it's quite possible that >$100 went into the keyboard.
However, I suspect you're coming at this from the perspective of a coder or a gamer or some other category who types thousands of keystrokes per day (tens of thousands?). With the assortment of special-function keys that enabled the user to execute common tasks with only two or three keystrokes, I suspect that even actively-used Bloomberg terminals may see an order of magnitude less keystrokes.
(On the third hand... I seem to remember reading that the Bloomberg system included chatroom functionality, which may increase keystroke count)
From memory when I worked there 10 years ago, all the Javascript based stuff was pretty slow in a very noticeable way. They've likely gotten better as they are using a well known Javascript and rendering engine, so they're getting many optimizations for free.
We’re in the middle of TC39 plenary in Tokyo right now as a matter of fact! Rob regularly posts on X as things advance through the staging process, and today is the final day.
That’s even assuming good faith on behalf of OAI, of course - I wouldn’t be surprised if three-letter agencies weren’t thinking of how to snoop into some of this work.
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