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:
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
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.
That should have been obvious from the mere fact that the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies.
> the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies
You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
I know a lot of traders from both university and growing up around rich kids. Their parents are invariably very wealthy. They were the ones who had the time and safety net to sit around on computers all the time (like me becoming a programmer)
I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description.
But exactly zero of the people I know who were raised in either poverty or mediocrity are traders or involved in finance, aside from maybe accounting.
Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children.
Perhaps things were a bit different decades ago, in the scrappy past, but it feels like most higher earning spheres are closing in around pre-existing wealth.
> I’m not in the trading world
I was. Algorithmic derivatives. The rich kids went into banking. Their connections bought deal flow. Those of us from public universities mostly went into trading. It’s why it’s been looked down on within Wall Street since basically ever.
> I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children
Parents buying their kids Bloomberg terminals aren’t looking for them to get into trading, they’re training them to start a hedge fund.
(I’d also guess a minority of folks with a BB are traders. It’s really more of a vetted calling card.)
Why would a trader need your consent to make a trade with somebody else?
I assumed they were referring to market crashes caused by irresponsible levels of risks and deceptive practices like we saw in 2008, and/or government-funded bailouts
That was not caused by trading. It was caused by irresponsible lending and deceptive securitisation of that debt.
Trading can bring down a bank (e.g.Barings) but is not a big systemic risk.
why should we have financial regulation at all, is that what you're getting at?
"Capitalism bad" is generally their point
often they're trading things with externalities
It’s pretty bad except that any other way is even worse.
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%."
Ptuh, call me back when Bloomberg implements spacebar heating!
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".
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?
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.