Comment by u8
4 hours ago
Yeah... people aren't paying Bloomberg $31,980 per year for a TUI. They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
4 hours ago
Yeah... people aren't paying Bloomberg $31,980 per year for a TUI. They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
Asked 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:
This is fascinating to be because I always assumed latency was the key. After all, the only Bloomberg terminal I've ever seen in person was hooked up to its own dedicated fiber drop. It seems like the chat and sheer breadth of data are the differentiators.
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.
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)
For a long time fixed income trading took place over AOL Instant Messenger and later Yahoo chat rooms.
I am not making this up.
There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.
I find it a bit less funny. There is this perception that what finance people do is super important and grown up but following a brief stint in the industry I realised it literally is just a game. We used to trade bits of stationery and trading cards for fun at school. They never stopped. The only difference is people who never consented to any of this are paying for it all, especially when it all goes wrong.
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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?
Apparently it's the Bloomberg chat
Bloomberg is big enough that different aspects of the system are going to be absolutely key for substantial subsets of its customers.
Hence quips like: "Most customers only use 10% of your features, but every customer uses a different 10%."
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Yes its a multi-decade long-tail of thousands and thousands of use cases all used in different combinations by different users.
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".
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.
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.
In freeports? So you mean like art?
> They're paying for the data source
Yup.
If you want fixed-income data, Bloomberg is the only shop on the street data-wise.
If you want other financial data, Bloomberg's fixed entry-point pricing tends to make more sense in terms of bang for buck than its competitors modular price sheets.
People saying Bloomberg is just about the chat are simply embarrassing themselves.
Look at the price sheets of Eikon, Factset, CapIQ etc. There is no such thing as a cheap "Bloomberg killer".
Quality data is expensive. So are the leased-lines it arrives at Bloomberg on. So is the data wrangling architecture.
It's a bit ironic that in a country with free markets, so much of the data that is relevant to modern finance is proprietary and quite expensive.
The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.
Bloomberg is also a channel for other data providers. You can access your gas pipeline flow data and index prices, which you buy from SP Global, via Bloomberg, for example. It brings data sources into one place.
This is what is wrong with the world today.
They're too busy dealing with their fake life problems to think about their impact on the world.
To be fair, I don't see anywhere on this page where they try to suggest that this is competitive with a Bloomberg terminal.
Seriously. I see a cool product that someone built and is sharing with the community, and the top comment is basically a criticism that it's not a $31k terminal.
It is almost like they want to be ripped off, the massive amount of gatekeeping is bizzare.
Financial information should be free for everyone.
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The name
Inspired by and competing with are different things
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Financial companies are cutting down on the amount associates can bill the firm for a $30 dinner, and the time before they can have the firm pay for a $30 car ride home. They definitely wouldn't pay for Bloomberg if it could be easily replaced.
Bloomberg terminal is only $133/day (assuming 240 work days per year). So, while $32k/yr seems expensive at first glance, given the total annual cost of an analyst or trader, it's not huge. Of course, they'd rather not spend the $32k/yr if they could avoid it, if bloomberg can give you an edge on just one or two trades a year, you come out ahead. So...
I bet its cheaper than tokens for software development with higher ROI.
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Skipping a dinner is not losing you much money.
Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Bloomberg, even if there was a viable alternative there is no way anyone is pioneering the switch.
Correct. Also, Bloomberg has messaging for traders that is actually an important network effect in certain domains.
Can you elaborate on the network effect piece? Curious about that
It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.
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Same effect as a country club. You know a lot about the person you’re talking to just based on their presence.
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Some assets are traded OTC aka “in a chat window”.
You're paying for direct lines to these firms. It's a big chat/social media platform. Combined with the data and news and you got yourself a hell of a platform
Good thing they're not asking $31,980 per year for it then?
Also, and in addition, the value of the Bloomberg Terminal is not the UI, it is the consistency. You don't pay for an accelerator and a break pedal, you pay for the 100% guarantee to find them in the place >100k people have been trained to find them.
Can't you just use a bunch of agents to extract financial statements from company websites the moment they are published? OK, no insider info but you can still do quick agentic fundamental analysis and decide which companies are interesting.
> They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
We keep seeing hundreds of Bloomberg competitors mimicking the interface and they always forget that the chat (with the connections), data and the newsroom are the reasons why Bloomberg's network effect is close to impossible to break.
Using the Bloomberg Terminal is taught very early at colleges for any finance professional, which is how they get them as well.
I think it is more oriented towards retail investors (if anybody) than professional users. In theory it could compete with TradingView?
(I’d especially love to see some federated social feature built in!)
Is it still though? I have a few finance friends and they all seem to be on TradingView these days
Are they trading bonds, equities, credit default swaps, options, , etc in large dollar amounts? “Finance” is pretty broad, Bloomberg is for traders and I-bankers afaict.
Many people pay the Bloomberg Terminal subscription ONLY for the chat. They don't use anything else from it.
I mean look at the name... this seems more like a fun quip than a product. I'm over here basking in the glow of dem vibes.
does the author claim to be a bloomberg clone?
Some of us are just here for the æsthetics! Plus I already have the SEA100 "Centerboard" with chrome accents, and this will help complete the look.
actually a lot of data is not included in the standard bloomberg license and you have to pay extra (mostly passing through to the data vendors) to get access to it.
There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.
it's a GUI and a TUI, pay attention to the screenshots
Does the GUI have Bloomberg's data source?