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.
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.
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.
It did. That’s why I said Australia was burned at first and changed their policy.
(Actually the longest lockdown in Melbourne was the second one, but it was only a couple of weeks after the first, I misremembered it as being one continuous lockdown.)
Subsequent lockdowns were shorter than elsewhere in the world because they reacted faster.
For a city, yes - seven or eight on again / off again hard lockdowns with a total of 262 days(?) or so of stay in place isolation.
At the state level Western Australia continuously self isolated for something like 18 months with a 14 day quarantine period for anybody wanting to enter for longer than it takes to turn a truck around.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
