Data aggregation is how the Terminal built its user-base, but messaging is what actually keeps people there. Bloomberg Chat is where most large trades get negotiated -- so if you don't have a login, you don't really have an identity as a trader. Makes it hard to switch.
It's a terrific example of network effect as moat. Several years ago, six of the largest banks got together to fund Symphony as a Bloomberg-killing chat tool [1]. More than $100M invested later, it's still only successfully competing with Bloomberg for internal chat at financial firms [2]. Inter-company chats are still happening mainly on full price terminals that costs 100x what Symphony costs for a seat.
Ah, thank you for that explanation. I used to work at a Commodities trading business. I never understood before why Yahoo Messenger was part of their standard Win desktop build. My Precious Metals desk never used it. Makes sense, though, if it was for the energy traders in Houston.
Yes it's a compliance nightmare. Context for my WhatsApp comment is SE Asian market if that makes a difference. Also curious if prohibitions are effective or if people still negotiate on other channels and then document on official one.
Usually when I hear people talk about alternatives to Bloomberg, my first though is that that they have no idea how many things Bloomberg actually covers. Sooo many products, so much data, you wouldn't even believe the scale. And yeah, as others have mentioned, massive network effect, essentially everyone in the capital markets. Sure, you might find an alternative for some very narrow specific thing that it does for a lot less money. (Worked there for many years, foreign exchange and bond trading stuff.)
For example, last year I kicked the tires on Bloomberg's PORT suite of portfolio performance attribution and risk measurement functions to get a sense of what they offered and how programmable it was. In addition to the standard extensive help docs, they had 56 white papers totaling ~1400 pages (as of June 2017) explaining the calculations. And that's for a small star in the Bloomberg constellation.
Google Finance is a laughable comparison to Bloomberg. Bloomberg is basically a self contained world. When I last dealt with it in the early 2000s, it had an internal messaging system, real time feeds for news from all over the world, and ability to trade and query on all sorts of markets around the globe. IIRC, your Bloomberg messaging handle is yours basically for life so no matter which company you work for you can still be reachable. It also integrates well with Excel and provides a huge amount of complex financial calculation functions (which I suppose Google or some other alternative might be able to do too, assuming they can hire the people who has the expertise). Oh and around the clock support. The only alternative that's even remotely close to that is Reuter's service. You can see why that's the only alternative -- very few organizations have the means to tap into all these data sources from around the world in basically real time.
You need to use a Bloomberg terminal and observe its users use them to really get an idea of what it provides before you can make a reasonable suggestion for an alternative.
Sadly no. The only viable (and closed) alternative to Bloomberg Terminal is Eikon from Thomson Reuters [1].
However, I find Routers finance news & details much more accessible than those from Bloomberg as they offer a bunch of rss feeds, depending on category you'd like to track.
I remember Thompson and Reuters joined forces shortly after I left Bloomberg (I worked there on the front end team). I think they wanted to take it on together.
That's true. There's a reasonably steady flow of articles on prospective "Bloomberg Killers"; this one in Institutional Investor (July 2017), Can Anyone Bury Bloomberg, is the best researched and informative that I've seen so far:
I tried it a long time ago (1.5 years?), it sucked.
It had pretty much the same fundamentals information you could get anywhere, including the tools that come with an Interactive Brokers account. And...that's it. Nothing else.
I wanted to pull up some options data and run some calculations. Very doable on something like Bloomberg, provided you read the manual (the school nearby has a terminal; I could certainly never justify the cost). It's like money.net had never even heard of an option. No analytics capabilities whatsoever.
what the other guy said. if you're a Bloomberg user, all you'll notice are the missing things. it is a prosumer offering, it doesnt suck, it just isnt targeted for you
Easy hunting for M&A in X space, customer lists, and then you can switch over to commodity data, or pretty much anything else you need, from research reports to data pulls into excel for models.
From the dumbest things to the really esoteric like filings of some obscure Hong Kong based firm or data on plasma waste to power projects in XYZ region.
1. Connectivity of news with data - a lot of news stories had links where you could dig in to datasets that were relevant to the news.
2. Availability of information under one symbol space allowing you to create views that pulls in information about very disconnected fields.
3. A company wide focus on converting things into "symbols". Most memorable example was the symbol for number of kidnappings in Mexico. The breadth of data available is truly impressive.
For bond trading and analytics, often no one has the data other than Bloomberg. INTEX has a lot of MBS and ABS data, Trepp has CMBS data, and I guess there are some muni and corporate specialists, but Bloomberg has it all and at your fingertips with an ergonomic UX, and any analytics you can think of. If you want to actively trade fixed income, you just can't do it without a Bloomberg.
The previous post is valid. Other examples, corporate actions (up to date and historic), identifiers for instruments as they appear on particular secondary markets (eg, what is the name if this security on aquis europe), current and historic close prices (for any venue you could name), otc/si trade reports. The broad spread and generally high quality of data is what drives the platform.
