At what time of day do famous programmers work? - <AUTHOR> https://ivan.bessarabov.com/blog/famous-programmers-work-time <comment><USER2> Personally, I'd be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time.

For at least 15 years I've had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don't accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/push/merge to master until the morning when everyone's there.

I realize that not everyone has policies like that, but these are high profile programmers who are likely to have their own complicating factors. Linus, for example, commits a lot of merges that other people depend on; his code reviews and code writing might be on separate schedules.

<comment><USER3> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

<comment><USER2> > Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during > weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches

That is what I'm saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch.

Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I've worked, plenty of people skip branching when they're making what they think are "small" changes. And some places I've been, the team has decided on a policy to skip branches & merges for single commit changes due to the history noise it causes.

The policy is to avoid breaking changes being committed to master when people aren't around to notice & fix it.

<comment><USER4> You're describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes.

One can commit and push to branches all day.

Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea, except where teams have implemented a process that can handle it

<comment><USER5> Many of us do a "squash merge" (use git rebase to compress to meaningful points in a CR and again before merging to master or feature branches). This creates a clean history at the expense of not being able to stalk others work at high granularity or get as large a score on github's tracker.

<comment><USER6> Git rebase interactive with fixup or squash will combine the commits into the first one. So the timestamp will still be somewhat reflective of when work is done (on average).

<comment><USER5> Though I wouldn't be surprised if there is at least some biasing. E.g. first commits happening relatively soon after regularly scheduled scrum meetings. At least if they're the type of developer who checkpoints after incremental changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My gut reaction to this was the same as everyone else - to question the validity of using commits as a measurement of time worked.

But then I read further and realized that this isn't a research study, it is just a clever script to output some data from github. So I'm going to go run it on a couple of my projects, see what it says, and enjoy that someone put it together.

<comment><USER8> I've run similar git stats scripts (I think it was a Debian package actually) on my own projects, and for me at least, they were pretty reflective of my own working habits, with a time lag of an hour or two in the mornings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From John Carmack:

> I often worked nights and slept during the day, but I almost always got 8 > hours of sleep. There are still 112 hours left in the week!

[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932718658366857216](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932718658366857216)

<comment><USER10> Happy to see this being pointed out. Sleep is the single most important factor in code quality & correctness [https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119709859979714560](https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119709859979714560)

<comment><USER11> Sleep is a very technical thing, it's a 'Brain maintenance time'. It's not about saving energy or anything that could/should be bypassed (otherwise we'd be tired awake at night, useful for defending against predators in the wilderness -- nature accepts a great cost for this shutdown). I find my memory improved significantly once I started being more careful with my sleep, for instance. I wish I had come into contact with this instead of the bragging 'I barely need any sleep!' culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a forgetful person, so I commit very often but with label "tmp", and later I squash them all into 1 proper commit before pushing. I'm sure I'm not alone, so commit time can't be used as barometer.

<comment><USER13> I dislike the apparent inability to label groups of changes with `git stash`, so instead before leaving a branch with in-progress changes I'll commit them all as "WIP". Then, when I return to the branch, I'll check if the previous commit was WIP (`git log -1`), and if so will reset it (`git reset HEAD~1`). It's the best workflow I've discovered for dealing with this problem, and it means that I don't lose my commit history which is otherwise very clean.

<comment><USER14> Temp branches or tags are probably the "proper" way to stash a history of changes in git. `git stash` is mostly a convenience feature for when you want to quickly clean up your working tree to eg. pull latest changes from a remote.

<comment><USER15> I like the approach of creating a new temporary branch for changes I need to stash. When I come back to the work I usually bring the changes back to the branch I'm working in with `git cherry-pick -n <commit hash>`. The -n flag cherry picks the changes over without making a new commit, so I can finish whatever I was doing and then make a proper commit.

<comment><USER16> I use stgit for this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To those asking about whether time zones are considered, the author responded in [1]:

> The script uses the time the author saw on his wall clock when doing the > commit. I can't imagine better time to use for such graphs

[1] [https://gist.github.com/bessarabov/674ea13c77fc8128f24b5e3f5...](https://gist.github.com/bessarabov/674ea13c77fc8128f24b5e3f53b7f094#gistcomment-2971934)

<comment><USER18> What does wall clock mean? How do they know the geographic position of the authors at their time of commit? I have my laptop's time set to my SO's because if I want to know my current timezone I can just look down at my watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the calculated wall time incorrectly.

>> The timestamp is the number of seconds since 1st January 1970. If we convert 1563188141 to more human date we'll get "2019-07-15 10:55:41" — that is the time in UTC timezone. Then we add "03" hours and "00" minutes to that time and get "2019-07-15 13:55:41" — that is the time the commit author can see on his wall clock when he did commit.

Usually the +0300 indicates that the times tamp is at +3 hours from UTC. Eg. the timestamp is already in local wall time. The offset can be used to convert it to UTC.

So if the author did what they wrote. Then I reckon all the data is actually in UTC and not local wall time.

<comment><USER20> Unix time is always the number of seconds since 00:00:00 Thursday, 1 January 1970 UTC time. Git records the committer's time zone, since the time would normally be converted back into a human readable form.

<comment><USER21> This is a good example of the ages old falsehoods about time. You're mostly right, but you're missing leap seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is a possible issue though - would they commit immediately after coding - how long do they need to work on a commit before actually committing it?

<comment><USER23> Another issue is that when you travel to a different timezone, you don't necessarily update the timezone of your system.

<comment><USER24> Aren't most devices configured to adjust automatically these days?

<comment><USER25> In the blog post it specifies that it uses the Unix timestamp, which doesn't account for timezones.

<comment><USER24> Yes and that's most irrelevant because we were discussing the device offset as users travel between timezones.

Unix Timestamps are always expressed as UTC/TUC which remain constant regardless of device offsets.

The origianl comment's assertion that users don't typically adjust their offsets is moot since commits are stored in UTC anyways. I was just pointing out that many devices automatically adjust offsets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every time of the day, it's like asking at what time does a musician compose, or an artist paint or a author write. Surely, we can consider the physical activity work, but the mental activity is also work and precedes the physical.

The brain churns on the problem at hand most of the time even when we are away from the computer. I would even be bold to say, more so when we are away from the computer and not distracted by typing.

<comment><USER27> > Every time of the day, it's like asking at what time does a musician > compose, or an artist paint or a author write.

That's a pretty useless way of seeing things. You might as well define eating or going on the toilet as 'writing' since hey, they _might_ be thinking about it while they're doing it. If you look at actual writers talking about when they write ([https://www.gwern.net/Morning- writing](https://www.gwern.net/Morning-writing)) many of them are quite explicit about taking breaks to do other work like correspondence or family/friends in order to not think about writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's difficult to draw any conclusion since we don't know their work pattern. If you commit at 12 it probably means you were working between 9 and 12, or between 11 and 12 or maybe it's just yesterday's work ? Who knows.

<comment><USER29> I usually work 9-5 and commit before going home. I might pick it up again at home and commit my changes before I go to sleep, around 11.

According to this study I would be working 5 to 11pm

</comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano As someone who generally works a 9-5 job at a company where most people are expected to work 9-5, can anyone explain if there are any norms or rules that enable someone to work such abnormal hours at their companies?

Do companies like Google not care as much about work hours? I can't imagine anyone showing up at 2pm at any of the places I've worked, regardless of how productive they were.

<comment><USER30> I think this really depends on the attitude of the company and specific managers. Each quarter I'm given a list of projects and just need to have them done by the end of the quarter.

Thankfully my boss has seen that I'm much more productive with my abnormal schedule so I'm inclined that this type of freedom probably comes on a case by case basis.

<comment><USER5> I know a former Technical fellow at Microsoft. He told me people gave him crap & joked it must be nice to be a TL and have the power to leave at 3P. On the other hand it had been years since he hadn't watched the sun rise drinking coffee at the office. He told me he tries to make sure he doesn't get out of bed till he hears his coffee machine go off at some time like 4A.

Also, at google I've known people to work part of the day from home or have moderately shifted schedules to avoid traffic. Though there are often team- wide "core hours" where you are expected to be available for a meeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I graphed this for myself a while ago in my work as a technical founder of CircuitLab (YC W13): [https://imgur.com/37mbya5](https://imgur.com/37mbya5)

Two striking findings emerged (and FYI I'm a "frequently commit small logical changes" person):

1\. My work patterns seemed surprisingly self-consistent, with a notable gap 2am-10am for sleep and around 1pm for lunch and exercise. (Plus a markedly lower average in the evenings after 7pm for seeing friends, just relaxing, etc.)

2\. The intersection between my curve and the window of 9:00am-6:00pm is only 53%. If a "conventional" employer were to constrain my productivity to that window, that's at least some first-order measure of how much inefficiency that constraint would likely produce for me personally -- 47% reduction.

</comment><comment><USER32> Fabrice Bellard apparently merges commits to Qemu between 21 and 22, and to FFmpeg between 22 and 23.

</comment><comment><USER33> I always code between 8 and 16 o'clock, sometimes until 17, but then stop.

Programmers and engineers have family and hobbies too.

Stop making the myth of the endurance programmer more and more inflated. It's proven and true that shorter working Hours have major bursts of productivity against longer ones.

</comment><comment><USER34> > and timezone information (+0300)

> to filter only the commits by one person get the local time of that commit > and aggregate it by hour when the commit was make

So these are all in local time of the computer doing the commit, if I am not mistaken.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how much this is related to age.

<comment><USER36> Quite a bit i'd imagine.

I used to write lots of code at all hours of the day, 8 hours at work, 6+ hours at home. Then i had kids, and while i still write code 8 hours a day at work, i rarely find the time to write anything in my spare time anymore.

Every now and then i have "some project" that i'm working on, but it's mostly in bursts of 2-3 days, followed by 3-5 days of "doing nothing". The 2-3 days are _not_ weekends, and i usually end up losing sleep over it.

Kids are relentless, and no matter how late you stayed up, they still get up at 6 AM, and needs to be taken to kindergarten/school, and requires you to be (mentally) present in the afternoon/evening.

I guess you could talk about a "soft burnout" happening from the 2-3 days burst.

I'm trying to change the burst periods into more frequent, shorter periods of 1-2 hours, hoping the increased frequency will reduce the "ramp up" time while getting "into the zone".

<comment><USER5> And there are other things that distract us with age. Eg I recently bought a house. Now I'm always coming home to do housework instead of coding. Also burnout can happen from acute events which we are more likely to run into over time. I hit a specific conflict at work and mostly lost the will to work OT for years after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Check for yourself in case you're interested: [https://gist.github.com/bessarabov/674ea13c77fc8128f24b5e3f5...](https://gist.github.com/bessarabov/674ea13c77fc8128f24b5e3f53b7f094)

</comment><comment><USER37> Nice graphs. It is interesting to note that the scale changes. In each graph, an asterisk represents a different number of commits. Especially of note is that Brad Fitzpatrick made a small number of commits in Memcached.

</comment><comment><USER38> The work patterns would be more interesting.

Does Bellard think the whole project through for days and then simply hacks it down in a few hours?

Does one of them use TLA+?

Do they use iterative approaches, where the first few versions are really buggy?

<comment><USER9> From the projects they mention, the only one I can see really benefiting from TLA+ would be memcached. For most things it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use it, unless you're writing a potentially distributed app. If you just want to model a regular program, then you'd be better off looking at PlusCal, which is more oriented to regular programs that aren't designed to be distributed. It compiles down to TLA+ so you get the same benefits, but with an easier to understand syntax.

Edit: Also if you want to learn about how famous programmers work, then there's no better source than the book Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. [http://www.codersatwork.com/](http://www.codersatwork.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does this take into account timezones?

<comment><USER24> 4th paragraph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Maybe maintainers commit "early", merging other people's work that piles up at night, while contributors commit "late", at the end of the workday?

</comment><comment><USER41> I code a lot at evening/nights but I almost always let it rest until the next day after waking up and do a review and then commit.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's interesting to me hearing people in the comments talk about committing after hours of work. I instinctively commit after every maybe 30 loc, especially if I feel it has value. I'll sometimes squash them down if the PR turns out particularly noisy. It would be interesting to compare the average size of commits as well I'd imagine.

<comment><USER43> I don't know, I commit logical units. Changes that do something. If they're a one liner, that's it. If it's 500 lines, that's it.

If it's more than a day of work I might commit and push unfinished stuff before i stop for the day, but otherwise no.

Edit: although the latter happens very rarely. IMO if a unit is a whole day of work, maybe it needs splitting.

<comment><USER44> I would like to do that at work but the code review and Jira ticket adds to much overhead so we mash stuff together to umbrella commits.

That is probably becouse we use Perforce where you don't do local branches by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How does got get "local" time zone. I sometimes commit on systems set to utc. And I'm unsure how many people accurately set time zone in online tools like github. And many devs esp famous ones travel a lot. Not to mention moving.

All this to say, there's too many unknowns for me to trust this "study"

</comment><comment><USER46> I've made a breakdown on a daily basis as well (statistics on #commits/hour/day) :

[https://gist.github.com/davidalbertonogueira/dfc1b114285523c...](https://gist.github.com/davidalbertonogueira/dfc1b114285523cf4367351a7ab92896)

</comment><comment><USER47> No one should care. Seriously. There is no super secret work time that will make you a super-programmer.

</comment><comment><USER48> Cool information! I've always thought that I am more productive in the morning - but now I'm interested in crunching the numbers to see what it actually looks like. Obviously you can be productive and not make commits to a project, but it would still be fun to know.

</comment><comment><USER49> I write a lot of code at night, then commit during the day after a double- check.

</comment><comment><USER50> Are the times localized to the timezone they're in?

</comment><comment><USER51> I've been meaning to do something very similar to this for a while to see what hours people at large tech companies are committing at

</comment><comment><USER52> But do you trust that commit time is going to actually be accurate? There si no telling how many off commit hours go into a pre-merge

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't get why so many people here are up in arms about commits not actually representing real work or when it was done. The author never stated what he thinks a commit represents and yet so many of you try to find some kind of flaw with his method and ascribe your own meaning to words he never said. Just enjoy this for what it is - a simple histogram for commits in a project.

</comment><comment><USER54> Travel would totally mess this up. I don't bother to update `timedatectl` when I am on the move.

</comment><comment><USER55> Should be interesting to also check if people work during weekends or not, not just the time of day.

</comment><comment><USER56> Who cares? Why does it matter?

<comment><USER57> Exactly, no-one cares. This industry is creating a culture of celebrity programmers and worshipping and glorifying the code they write.

It does not even remotely matter. What matters is who is going to maintain all of this after the years to come. (Or they could be even obseleted or superseeded anyway.)

<comment><USER58> For-profit clickbait items reinforce unhealthy and unrealistic digital hallucinations to stay in business, and celebrity developer bloggers do much the same in order to advance their careers. You don't know how they are to work-with or if they have even earned their chops. Worse, the celebrity effect tends to ruin most people as they become insufferably entitled and/or uncooperative. These sort of people are often vastly overrated and can absolutely annihilate the morale of teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> But why you interested in famous ones instead of the productive ones? :)

</comment><comment><USER60> Are the commits represented in UTC time when using the script?

<comment><USER34> It's in local time as an offset of UTC. So, if you pool by repo then you could have two commits at 13:00 even though they were commited at different times of the day, but in different time zones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Do all these individuals work from a US time zone, or does fit report the user's local time zone from which the commit was made?

<comment><USER62> It is local time zone. The commit log has time zone info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's unfortunate that the author chose to only include male programmers in the post.

<comment><USER64> Why is it unfortunate? Or am I missing some sort of implication here? And what about black programmers? Does it matter? If so, why?

<comment><USER5> Hypothetically the author thought of "epic programmers" and only came up with white males. Women and PoC have given great contributions in our industry and are underrepresented. This could have been an opportunity for the author to learn about some and give them a bit of credit.

<comment><USER65> Can you give us some examples of programmers of "epic" repute that are women or people of color? (Or both?) I'd like to be able to bring them up when I find myself reading something that doesn't include them.

<comment><USER5> As a google employee the first person who comes to mind is Sanjay Ghemawat. Jeff Dean is upheld to mythical levels within Google but he pair programs with Sanjay who is almost unknown.

Jess Frazelle is pretty famous for her work on dockerization as well.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Ghemawat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Ghemawat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> All day and all night!

</comment><comment><USER67> tl;dr Rob Pike eats lunch at noon

</comment><comment><USER68> Let's cargo cult the advice on this ftw. Also let's piss off our managers by saying, "Yeah, I heard this on Hacker News." Here for the downvotes to get back to 666.

<comment><USER58> Lmao. OP items like these reek of people looking for shallow poser shortcuts rather than digging in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> > Linus is the author of the Linux operating system

Hmmmm... Not quite. Albeit I am a massive fan of the Linux kernel, though Torvalds is _not_ the author of the Linux operating system (if we assume that Linux is the equivalent of GNU utilities + the Linux kernel).

<comment><USER70> Why would we assume this? A kernel is absolutely an operating system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Author is probably a non-native English speaker, so, gentle correction: "At what time of day _do_ non famous programmers work?"

<comment><USER72> The original article was written in Russian, so I'm assuming this is an automatic translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> TIL who the hell these 'famous' folks are!

<comment><USER74> Who would you consider famous among currently active programmers that aren't on this list?

I knew about half of the list (mainly the authors of software I use). I could probably name a few who are equally famous, but not many who are more famous.

edit: I went back and counted. I recognized 4 of 7 names.

<comment><USER75> To be fair, every community has its own heroes. Somebody like Bellard is probably completely unknown to most people living in the MS ecosystem, for example.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft AC power cord recall for Surface - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/powercord <comment><USER2> Yup, my power cord is exposed exactly at the point shown in the closed tabs below. I hate that so many companies have followed Apple's lead in removing the relief (I think it was called) so we can have cleaner looking power cords that are more dangerous.</comment>


Let-caribou-in - <AUTHOR> http://let-caribou.in/ <comment><USER2> The websites look fantastic, I am going to give this a shot today. I have been looking at Luminus as a Clojure framework, however Caribou looks pretty nice.

Great time to be interested in creating websites with Clojure!</comment>


New Google Easter Egg - <AUTHOR>

Go to the website, don't type anything and hit "I'm feeling lucky!", a counter appears. At first it looks like it's a countdown in seconds to new year, but it actually is running faster than seconds, so what could this be? <comment><USER2> 1727463 / (60 * 60 * 24) ~ 19 + 12 (today) = 31 = Happy New Year.

<comment><USER3> Exact ans... great

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you look at the js source, it's until Date(2010,0,1)

Guess someone at Big G is really looking forward to 2010

<comment><USER5> No doubt, some googler is probably from planet Earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1745996+seconds+from+11...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1745996+seconds+from+11th+december+2009+19%3A01+PST)

also [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+seconds+until...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+seconds+until+new+years+day)

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe they're (also) counting down to the end of their code freeze?

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121101132.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe they've finally made javascript so fast that it distorts time itself.

<comment><USER5> Someone here mentioned the Bubblemark[1], I forgot which thread, and I tested it myself:

Javascript in Chrome and Firefox is faster than Flash or Flex. But slightly slower in Opera and Safari, and much slower in IE. All on x86, 32-bit Win XP.

FWIW.

\--

[1]<http://bubblemark.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If they're seconds, they equals ~20.2 days. Seems like the 2010 countdown.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it's exactly the # of seconds to 1/1/2010 in your local time zone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hm, apparantly this is not everywhere yet as I got the error saying that you have to put in a search for it to work. Sad

<comment><USER2> Try this: <http://www.google.com/ncr>

<comment><USER11> That worked, interesting. Especially since I was hitting .com (I'm in the USA).</comment></comment></comment>


Duracell myGrid - <AUTHOR> http://www.duracell.com/en-US/category/mygrid.jspx

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is the first time a mainstream battery company bringing to market at charging pad. They seem to be targeting it at large number of popular smart phones. It will be interesting if it can gain traction.</comment>


Parallel Distributed Processing Theory in the Age of Deep Networks [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://jeffbowers.blogs.ilrt.org/files/2017/11/bowers-tics-2017.pdf <comment><USER2> Abstract:

> Parallel distributed processing (PDP) models in psychology are the > precursors of deep networks used in computer science. However, only PDP > models are associated with two core psychological claims, namely that all > knowledge is coded in a distributed format and cognition is mediated by non- > symbolic computations. These claims have long been debated in cognitive > science, and recent work with deep networks speaks to this debate. > Specifically, sin- gle-unit recordings show that deep networks learn units > that respond selec- tively to meaningful categories, and researchers are > finding that deep networks need to be supplemented with symbolic systems to > perform some tasks. Given the close links between PDP and deep networks, it > is surprising that research with deep networks is challenging PDP theory.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A not-paywalled version of the paper can be found here: [http://jeffbowers.blogs.ilrt.org/files/2017/11/bowers- tics-2...](http://jeffbowers.blogs.ilrt.org/files/2017/11/bowers- tics-2017.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we've changed the URL to that from [http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- sciences/fulltext/S1364...](http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613\(17\)30216-4).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is BS .. where is the full text?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, I was browsing using my university proxy and didn't think this was obviously paywalled. Apologies.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal? - <AUTHOR> From what I understand so far, it's just a portal that gives the news. What I don't get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard? I am not sure how is the network connected, is it a VPN. The cost of the product is ridiculous. I do not understand why are people paying for it. Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware? I know Bloomberg is a politician, has he managed to pass some ridiculous law that forces everyone to pay for his product?<p>P.S.: I do not understand Finance or the wall street world. But I am curious to know about the tech they use and why they are paying a huge amount for it. <comment><USER4> It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades.

Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don't mean relatively basic info like "What's the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?" or "What's the current CDS spread for Citibank?" that you can easily google for but also stuff like "Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?" and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.

Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).

Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.

<comment><USER5> This is hyperbole, I've worked on dev side in finance a while now and bloomberg data is often unreliable, everywhere I've worked people have built layers on top of it, checking vs other sources and fat fingers. Also I'm actually currently working for some oil guys and they use bloomberg for some things but use specialist providers for oil macro, shipping and refinery events. I'd say their main advantages are familiarity and some information oligopolies

<comment><USER6> > This is hyperbole

What I love about HN. I read one thing that sounds great and authoritative in a subject that I know nothing about. Just to have someone else rain on the parade! Which point of view is correct? I don't know (so I upvoted both..)

<comment><USER7> > sounds great and authoritative

"sounds" being the operative word. Lots of ... lets say 'articulate' people on HN, in general. Current thread excepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think most of your questions can be answered by realizing that Bloomberg was founded in 1981, and they basically got a monopoly in financial data provision because _there were no other options in 1981_. That is why they have a custom monitor & keyboard: in the days before the IBM PC, _everyone_ had a custom monitor & keyboard, because these things were not standardized. Bloomberg was a technologist & businessman before he was a politician; his business success gave him the money to run for office, his office doesn't force people to pay for Bloomberg.

The reason they're _still_ a monopoly is because knowing how to navigate a Bloomberg is a critical skill for most finance professionals, and now that they have that skillset, they can be very productive moving around in it. A different (better?) UI would require they re-learn everything, which is not going to happen. And when financial professionals are making half a million a year, paying $24k/year for a terminal so that they can be productive isn't a bad investment.

(Source: have a couple friends at Bloomberg. One is in their UI department, and keeps having his proposals for better UIs shot down for business reasons. Also married a financial professional who had to use a Bloomberg in her days as a bond trader.)

<comment><USER9> They're a total 80's icon, too. If you see a movie set in the early 80's and there's a computer-ish thing on someone's desk, it's most likely a Bloomberg terminal.

<comment><USER10> The movie "Wall Street" is littered with them.

<comment><USER11> Not sure if you mean the new "Wall Street" (which I haven't seen), but in the old one, those are Quotrons, not Bloombergs. Bloombergs have always been orange-on-black not green or white.

Way back when, only bond traders used Bloombergs. Equity and FX guys used other things (Quotron, Reuters, maybe?)

<comment><USER10> Oh dear, my mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> charles-salvia The best way to think about the Bloomberg terminal is a web browser that connects you to a private network. (Bloomberg actually is the largest known private network.) Once connected, you have access to thousands of "web apps" \- which Bloomberg users call "functions". Instead of a URL, you use a short 2 to 5 letter mnemonic code for each function, such as "MSG" for email, or "TOP" for top news. These different functions provide all sorts of various functionality - most of them are of course related to financial information. Functions like "CDSW" are for analyzing credit default swaps, "SDLC" gives you supply chain data for different companies, other functions analyze or curate Twitter, others correlate news events with historical stock data, etc. There are also many non-financial functions as well that reflect the "social network" aspect of the Bloomberg terminal, such as "POSH" which is basically a high-end Craigs list, or "DINE" which is a high-end Yelp.

All-in-all, the Bloomberg Terminal is like a private Internet for financial professionals.

<comment><USER12> Your remark about Bloomberg being the largest private network is interesting. By what measure it is the largest (#people, #machines, miles of links?) and which ones count as private?

<comment><USER13> SIPRNet is probably an order of magnitude larger with over four million users [1]. Even more impressive considering it isn't connected to the Internet.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet)

<comment><USER14> I wonder what exactly "isn't connected to the internet" means. Every time we build a military installation, we lay a dedicated cable from its nearest neighbor? That can't be right.

Maybe it's mostly using satellite connections?

Seems like there'd be many times (particularly in the US) where tunneling an encrypted connection over a civilian ISP would be worlds better than the next best option. Maybe not even at the IP level, but a dedicated wavelength on some existing AT&T fibre, for example.

<comment><USER15> Seems like they have their own network of satellites and terrestrial wires, with less secure stuff going through the internet. This is interesting enough to me that I'd research further but the amount of jargon and acronyms has turned me away.

> Provide DISN-provided transport and information services used for > data, > voice, video, and cross domain __through a combination of terrestrial, > > aerial, satellite assets, and services IAW DODD 5105.19 (reference c) __. > > Transport services include information transfer services between CC/S/A > > installations, facilities, and enclaves, for connections to external mission > > partner and defense contractor ISs and networks, and wide area network > > information transfer.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20120914011329/http://www.dtic.mi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120914011329/http://www.dtic.mil/cjcs_directives/cdata/unlimit/6211_02.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a good question. There are many reasons - and I don't think the speed of information is the real one. I almost left a single word response - "chat" \- but think it is more complicated.

Another aspect is trust. If you are trading billions you want the information/trade data "currency" everyone else uses. I built backends converting MBS bid to yield and if it wasn't tuned to a 1/16 or better of Bloomberg, it wasn't usable.

Bloomberg also offers custom studies like "fear/greed" which may have some value.

TR/Thompson Reuters also has a competitive product for much less and you can't really go wrong with either for 99% of use cases.

There are also many stand alone news sources you could use. Benzinga comes to mind as one example.

Interesting note - Bloomberg is highly protective of their IP and has been know to write takedown notices of screenshots posted online.

// built 2 SaaS Fintech systems

</comment><comment><USER17> I think Bloomberg is a lot weaker than people realize (in terms of competitive position). It offers a lot of functionality as many threads have pointed out but at any given time, the marginal user utilizes 0.5% of what it does. I sat in fixed income origination for years and the only reason I used it was to find some obscure pricing details which are now available for free elsewhere and to quickly export interest rate curves. Our traders definitely found it mission critical but there were 3 of them and 40 of us. Now if you go to someone within equity-linked securities, they will use it for a variety of different reasons but my friends there admitted they used it for 2-4 discrete pieces of functionality.

I believe one of their great data advantages is access. Buy a terminal and you will now have access to niche email distribution lists that no website sees or crawls with important market data (like fixed income bwics).

I believe it is difficult to attack Bloomberg head on as others are trying (like money.net or Eikon) but relatively easy to build really rich ecosystems in niche places outside of Bloomberg. Have you heard of a company called Intex? Probably not. In the global structured products market they are a monopoly solution generating 100-200mm in top line with 100 employees and 3 sales people. Wildly profitable but try to start something like that without being in structured products for years and you're dead on arrival. No one will give you the data you need.

<comment><USER17> PS: Here is an example of a great niche tool we loved as analysts and associates with thousands of active professional users. It was created by one person on the side (now a team of two) and generates hundreds of thousands of dollars in fully automated revenue. The challenge is that those who use EDGAR frequently instantly see the utility but someone outside of the industry would not know this even exists or the problem it solved.

www.bamsec.com

ps this is not a personal plug. I do know the founder now but only after I discovered tool and reached out.

<comment><USER18> I am curious what you find compelling about Bamsec? It certainly has a cleaner interface than EDGAR, but are there any other advantages?

<comment><USER17> In a word: Speed. As an analyst and associate I spent a ton of time on EDGAR and this tool wiped out easily 20 to 45 min of work a day. It's a collection of subtle enhancements for example it pulls the title of an 8k rather than me having to guess which 8k out of a dozen contain the information I need. It now has a transcript search that allows you to search for word references across all filing (dozens to hundreds at a time) for a company which can easily save hours. There are a lot of subtle enhancements that are not worth enumerating on HN but feel free to ping me and I can go deeper into it if you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bloomberg (the company) became the de facto standard in the financial industry decades before Mike Bloomberg became a politician.

Mike Bloomberg started the company because while working at Merrill Lynch (in the 80ies) he thought the computer terminals banks used at the time to see stock and bond prices where ridiculous. He got funded by Merrill Lynch and disrupted the industry, overtaking rivals like Reuters (which well into the 90ies was usually considered the most trustworthy source for stock data)

You needed their special hardware only until the late nineties (the "Bloomberg box" \- consider that up until around 96 or 97, only few employees would have internet access on their desktop, even inside "bulge bracket" investment banks): nowadays, you can get Blooomberg terminal on their workstation or on your own hardware. Likewise, you can run in on a dedicated connection, or on your normal internet line.

The key element of Bloomberg terminal is reliability: it feeds data you can usually trust and price feeds you can almost certainly trust. When you are checking prices changing several times a second across exchanges in different part of the world that's no easy feat). That's crucial when millions of dollars are at stake.

Second is the ability to access 80% of the data and information you would ever want to check wihout leaving the terminal.

Third ingredient is ease of use.

Fourth is incredible customer service.

Fifth is innovation: they continuously innovate, improve old features, add new features, introduce access to new data/information.

Once you remove the cost of the underlying live price feeds (from stock exchanges), The Bloomberg terminal is not that expensive for what it does. Bear in mind its customers are people that spend their day optimizing their financial decisions: if there was something cheaper working as well, they would go for it. If there was something working even better, they would go for it, probably even at a higher price point (because that's how the economics in the banking and investing world work).

Fun read: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the- blo...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-bloomberg- terminal)

<comment><USER20> Bloomberg was a partner at Solomon Brothers, where he developed their in house IT systems.

Solly infamously demutualized, under John Gutfreund, and in that process, Bloomberg left, presumably with any IP waivers he needed (after all, they had to get partners to agree to be paid off, and that was a political battle) and from that position, it was I imagine, certainly easier, to attract Merril to invest in the new venture, as 50% partners.

Merill later sold i think all but a token stake, and Bloomberg was the majority buyer for their shares.

At no time did Michael Bloomberg work for Merill Lynch.

His timing, and trading, was impeccable.

Solly was long the 800lb gorilla of fixed income.

Coming from a former partner, the intimacy he had with the intriciacies of data (especially the archaic clearing systems he led to be automated, literally Solomon Brothers cared only for their front desks by habit, legendarily earning so much as to get away with a devil may care attitude long past when most firms would have been bust by conterparties declaring oprisk indigestible) he probably could have held a beauty parade for potential investors. Merril was probably chosen for two equally important characteristics, however: passivity as investors, and out size retail salesforce, immediate users for new equities data products Bloomberg wanted to launch.

Pretty sure they were long one of the largest Tandem customers, and may still rum Tandem for messaging. As noted in other comments, their messaging is nigh bullet proof. As is also noted in other comments, they give a real damn about latency, so make telcos (at least telco sales reps) weep no doubt more than most customers.

If there is a lesson for the startup world, i think it is this (besides way to trade to get his investment): there are apparently infinite messaging products, and a multiple thereof of features for messaging, but if you want to grow a high margin niche monopoly, or just a business period, build your messaging like civilization itself depends on it. How many hundreds of billions in capital have been made and lost in what are essentially messaging products? But name one that can count a few nines of reliability you'd entrust your capital, your family's emergencies, your daily banking, to, that is on the web?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> \- the custom keyboard may have been a holdover from the early versions of Bloomberg, today its not as useful. I personally think the key response on it is terrible. So I actually just keep it plugged in for the fingerprint scanner.

\- bbg is about quick access to data. Most of the data is publicly available. But if you serve it up super quick and consistently, people value that

\- the chat application is what the vast majority of people pay for, IMHO. This gives you access to most other people in your industry or product group. This is how business is conducted. \- bbg has an army of people backing their product.. from the bbg help to data cleaners. This ensures quality for the high price you're paying

</comment><comment><USER22> Another point - Bloomberg by an large doesn't fail. This isn't some consumer "build fast, break things, and iterate" model. I can remember one time in my two decades using Bloomberg that something broke. For half a day this year the IB chat system went down. The world of finance practically ground to a halt. But that was the wild exception. Compared to most platforms Bloomberg may be a bit archaic but it is rock solid and thats way more important when you have billions on the line in realtime.

<comment><USER23> What's amazing about this is that (at least as of the time when I worked there, 2003-2007) they've always broken just about every rule about coding style, DRY, unit tests, and so on ("We're not writing textbooks here") and yet (or because of this) were by a wide margin the highest-velocity shipper-of features I've ever known.

And this was all done while meeting the highest standards of performance and reliability. How'd they do it? I'd say two things: heavy investment in human testers, and an amazingly-rich "immune system": Deploy a bug in your new version of a Bloomberg function? Last week's code is still running alongside it, and in seconds you can route that one function over to the old instance while keeping all the other terminal functions on the new version. And an automated system might do it for you before you even get paged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used the Bloomberg terminal until 2010 so things might have changed since then. The breadth of the data is unrivaled as far as I know, enough examples have been given in the comments. Concerning the data quality I do have to object though, in my area of expertise (mutual funds at the time) Bloomberg data was far from perfect and there were better quality data sources available. I dont doubt that they deliver reliable real time quotes from stock exchanges etc.

Excel integration was generally good, at the time I used the Terminal you had however to decide between two types of applications. The original Terminal which is linked to one PC, i.e. can only be accessed from one specific PC at work and not from home, or the 'Bloomberg anywhere' edition, which I believe was launched as some kind of remote application from a browser and could be used at any PC. The issue with the latter option was that it did not offer Excel integration.

I never liked the UI, some windows application with a lot of 'Terminal' baggage from the 1980's. I think they should re-build the whole thing as a browser based application, not replacing the old 'Terminal' application that current users are accustomed to but to on-board new users on a modern platform with a long term migration path to shut down the current application for good. Otherwise they might be replaced by a newcomer eventually...

[https://www.money.net/](https://www.money.net/) seems to be such a potential newcomer, especially considering the much more reasonable price point and the use of current technology.

<comment><USER25> > I think they should re-build the whole thing as a browser based application

Hopefully they understand that it would be a terrible idea. The current interface is orders magnitude more usable and responsive than a web interface could be. Despite the "terminal" look-and-feel it's constantly evolving and many parts are quite modern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 315,000 subscribers paying north of $20,000 per year, as of 2013.[0] _Whoa._

[0] [https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg- terminal-c...](https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal- costs/)

<comment><USER27> It's interesting to think about from a different angle:

Paul Graham once wrote that "information wants to be free", and that there are very few areas in which you can make a significant revenue by selling information, financial information being the exception.

$6B ($9b) seems to be the upper bound of revenue for an information product (company). And Bloomberg has unusually wide moat.

<comment><USER28> Minor correction: it was Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) who said "Information wants to be free". Paul Graham may have quoted it -- along with a multitude of others, since it was first uttered in 1984.

Actually turns out the original quote attributed to Brand is not quite right. There is a qualifier ("Information almost wants to be free"), but that qualifier dropped off along the way.

See [http://www.digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to- be...](http://www.digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-free-the- history-of-that-quote/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the correction! I recall that I learned the phrase from pg's writing or talk, and it has stuck with me since so I mistakenly attributed it to pg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I used to work for Bloomberg. They bring together countless data feeds, analytical tools, some analysis and news into one central location. They pump a lot of money into these data capturing efforts. They hire hoards of data capturing grunts to trawl the web for renewable energy projects and heavens knows how many more to process financial statements.

I suppose at the end of the day even though they do all this I'm not 100% sure they do it very well. I don't use the terminal or claim to know how, but it seems to have have become an essential tool for many people in the finance industry.

Although after all that I know there is a joke going around that the main reason most people fork out for the terminal is for the chat functionality.

</comment><comment><USER30> I asked the finance guys at the asset management firm I worked at last, and they said that the #1 value to them was in the chat. So many deals are arranged via the built-in chat system. News can be acquired from many places, but if you capture the communication (or create the platform, as BB did), then you capture your audience.

It's very hard to break out of that, because doing so means you're now excluded from some of the most useful and important information. Nobody wants to be first to leave, and convincing enough users to leave en masse to create or use an alternative seems impossible at this point.

<comment><USER31> Bloomberg is also aggressive in retaining customers. A few years back, there was a scandal where Bloomberg News reporters used Terminal data to see that a target of their news story had not logged in for a bit and wrote about it. Since this was breach of trust between the two parts of Bloomberg, many of the banks starting looking into alternatives for BBG chat, and Bloomberg responded by offering the banks (their existing customers) many discounted terminals. Which seemed to have worked since the scandal died down and their chat is still the leader in wall street communication.

<comment><USER32> In case anyone else was curious about this scandal, I found the following contemporary article writing about it: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg- admits-terminal-snooping.html)

According to [https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see- when-t...](https://qz.com/83445/what-bloomberg-employees-can-see-when-they- snoop-on-customers/) , _all_ Bloomberg employees could see when a user last logged in (like "w" in Unix), transcripts of all chats between the user and customer service (these chats are triggered by pressing F1/HELP twice, as other comments have indicated), and how many times the user used specific functions over the last 30 days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Symphony was marketed by Goldman Sachs and Blackrock as a $15 Bloomberg killer, but still has not gained much traction. Bloomberg provides real-time data feeds, analysis tools, real-time secure communication with other traders, news and entertainment. When you are looking after AUMs of tens or hundreds of billions, $24,000 a year for a Bloomberg subscription is negligible.

"Potential users don't want to get onboard unless all the other people in their ecosystem are on the service. That dynamic obviously keeps most people from joining Symphony. Most everyone working in financial markets is already on Bloomberg, and it would take virtually everyone leaving at the same time to give Symphony critical mass.

"I think Facebook is the best comparison," Ayzerov says. "If Facebook had only one fourth of your friends, you wouldn't use it. The advantage of Bloomberg is that every financial person has it.""

See [http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3572874/banking...](http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3572874/banking- and-capital-markets-trading-and-technology/symphony-faces-stiff-obstacle- bloomberg.html) for some of the obstacles that Symphony faces

</comment><comment><USER33> "BMAP is the coolest.

Pulls up a global map with "near-realtime" locations of cargo ships, offshore oil derricks and wind farms, tropical depressions and hurricanes, uranium mines, all kinds of crazy stuff.

You can zoom in on the Panama Canal and see which oil tankers under whose flag are waiting in line to pass through, where they're going and how much oil they're carrying.

You can sort the world's ocean-going cargo vessels by commodity, to see where all the orange juice is."

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on- Bloo...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloomberg)

</comment><comment><USER34> * Bloomberg Chat

* It is a well accepted reference. You will often see a screenshot of a bloomberg terminal as "proof" of something

<comment><USER35> Voting up on the Bloomberg Chat. Most of the people in Finance do not really use other functions but due to network effects, most people get 'connected' via Bloomberg Chat.

<comment><USER36> Please explain what Bloomberg chat is, and how you find people via it.

<comment><USER37> It's like MSN Messenger or AOL, except that the identities of people on it are guaranteed, and things said on it are effectively contracts. Reuters operate a similar system. There are others too but no-one uses them.

<comment><USER38> Can you expand? Are identities checked and referenced, or enforced socially like on LinkedIn? When you say things are effectively contracts, I've heard about the very solid principles that some finance people work to - "if we said it then we will stand by it" sort of things - or does Bloomberg step in to arbitrate, or are chats accessible by the employing companies, how are contracts enforced?

<comment><USER37> They are "checked" in the sense that ultimately there's a name associated with that expensive login. All chats are logged and available to compliance, regulators, etc. Bloomberg won't arbitrate but they don't have to - <USER2> knows that if you welshed on a deal, no-one would ever deal with you again. This is the same way that voice calls in banks work too.

<comment><USER39> I'm amazed this hasn't been exploited.

<comment><USER37> Exploited in what way?

<comment><USER39> Entered the network, manipulated data, created misinformation, use social engineering tricks and tried to control stock pricing. When you have a platform only accessible to the elite, it makes the possibilities extremely tempting.

<comment><USER37> You would have more luck impersonating voices on the phone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> it's everything:

\- news articles

\- squawk

\- economic data releases

\- historical and live market data

\- asset pricing

\- charts and analytics

\- click trading

\- trade execution and transaction cost analysis

\- trade order management and post trade processing

\- portfolio and risk management

\- alerts

\- chat

\- mail

\- Excel integration

\- amazing stuff like DINE<GO>, FLY<GO>, and POSH<GO> (lol)

there's probably a ton more stuff that i don't use and don't know. bloomberg is a mile wide and a mile deep in some areas.

you can get any of these features individually from plenty of service providers in the market. some are less specialized and cheaper and some are more specialized and more expensive. if you don't want to manage fifty different contracts with different service providers bloomberg provides a one- stop shop.

bloomberg is more than just data now. it wants to be absolutely everything that a financial firm needs - front office, middle office, back office.

<comment><USER41> > DINE<GO>, FLY<GO>, and POSH<GO>

Can you ... can you order takeout from a Bloomberg terminal?

<comment><USER42> "FLY and DINE give you flight schedules and restaurant listings and reviews."

"POSH, a Craigslist for the wealthy"

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on- Bloo...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-coolest-functions-on-Bloomberg/)

Banking software also use this type of codes to reach different functions: post a cheque, take a draft, print an account statement, update customer record, loan balance/amortisation/payback history; in short, they do everything with short 3-4-5 letter keywords. This type of system has very high learning curve ("Hey Alex, what's the keyword for locker rent arrears list?"); but it is a joy to watch competent people operate the program to get things done.

Many business software also work this way (SAP ERP/Oracle Financials), but none of them are likely to be as fast as Bloomberg though. AutoCAD also has some commands like this (like Emacs'/Vim's ex/M-x prompt? ":"/"M-x"). I wish other consumer software also allowed access to screens/dialog boxes and functions in this direct manner without having to click menus and buttons a thousand times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bloomberg has a massive network effect which makes it difficult to displace. Particularly when you move away from exchange traded products like equities and into areas like corporate fixed income, interactions are still conducted via bilateral discussion (i.e., online chat and text price dissemination). To be in the game you need to be where everyone else is talking. There is an ecosystem of price scraping and trade processing in Bloomberg which facilitates the whole trade and portfolio management process. I can route orders via Bloomberg to any broker and monitor execution of my orders in real- time. No the costs are not cheap but it is a lot cheaper than hiring several members of an operations team which would be necessary if this was all done manually.

Bloomberg is also like an operating system. For example, there are electronic execution venues in many types of instruments which use the Bloomberg as their front-end. This is very valuable. When you are a trader, screen real estate is critical. You can have 6 30" monitors and it still isn't enough if your tools are fragmented across 50 platforms. The more you can keep things integrated into a few core tools the better.

You are also paying a ton for ultra-responsive service. When millions or billions are on the line you don't have time to mess around on a help-line. On a Bloomberg you have 24-7 ultra-responsive skilled help who are responsive in around 30 seconds.

There are other reasons but end of the day if you are a pro then 30k/year isn't cheap but its a lot cheaper than trying to hack around with amateur tools.

<comment><USER43> > 24-7 ultra-responsive skilled help who are responsive in around 30 seconds

True apart from the "skilled" part. They have cut-n-paste monkeys staffing 1st line help-help support and you know it.

Any question that actually involves thinking (bugs in their software or interesting questions about the API or details of their financial models) just gets passed through a game of telephones until you reach the actual competent people hours or days after you have devised a workaround for the burning issue yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's more than news. It also provides real-time financial data, access to trading, and a way to securely communicate with other traders.

You can find some background here on what it does:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal)

</comment><comment><USER45> UCF has a great tutorial video on the Bloomberg terminal. It is an hour and 7 minutes long, but watch it and you will see why it's the standard in finance. The data/news feed is great and UX is optimized for speed, dense display of information, and filtering.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE)

<comment><USER46> > UX is optimized for speed, dense display of information, and filtering

I often wish more software would make the same UX trade-offs.

I suspect this is why a lot of advanced users stick with the command line - <USER3> better "pro" UX is surely possible (REPLs / notebook style interfaces are a limited example) but outside of programming tools there doesn't seem to be much serious effort in this space.

<comment><USER47> > I often wish more software would make the same UX trade-offs.

It's worth noting that this is the antithesis of mainstream designer thinking right now. Designers i've worked with want to minimise the amount of information on screen to maximise its impact and clarity; lots of blank space, lots of elegance. Perhaps this works for general consumer apps, but it's not what heavy professional users want, are accustomed to, or can make the best use of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The terminal is the 'last-mile' endpoint in a centralized system that delivers real-time data to subscribers with low latency and actually allows them to take action on data. Low latency is what sets it apart from closest competitors such as Reuters.

The ability to trade is perhaps no so important these days given the advent of algo trading/stat arb, but it serves to emphasize the point that there is more to the terminal than just viewing the data.

</comment><comment><USER49> It is pretty simple: network effects.

Nearly every trader, sales person, and investment manager in finance has a bloomberg terminal which is guaranteed to own a lot of screen real estate on their monitors. If you need to get in touch with someone as quickly and efficiently as possible, bloomberg chat is the way to go. You are usually involved in multiple conversations at once so phones just don't cut it.

I traded two different products that were almost exclusively traded via IB (chat) or MSG (email like). There is nothing special about either of those communication channels, but market norms are incredibly powerful.

As others are mentioning, Bloomberg also centralizes a ton of different data, but this much easier to replicate than the network effects of the products above.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's fast in terms of time takes from press release to screen, total news coverage is unrivaled (Reuters you could say maybe), forgot how many trillions of dollars they control all together. bonds they are the king, tradebook, their international financial data is a little rough, and their sales force is relentless. Try to sell me a god damn terminal every time. also they were ahead of pack regarding supply chain data, graph modeling, they are moving into Law.

<comment><USER51> Scraping press releases, collecting news from various media outlets, monitoring socialmedia and then pushing all this info to a web/desktop app in real time seams rather trivial...? Wheres the secret sauce?

<comment><USER50> first to market?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think it has very little to do with the end-user hardware, and everything to do with their data. Bloomberg is dominant in data quality. Really, whatever financial information you want, you can get, provided you're willing and able to pay the price.

Their data is faster and cleaner than most of their competition. Personally, I find their interface clunky by today's standards, but it's entrenched in the industry, so there's a non-trivial learning "cost" for anyone considering switching away, and even if they're able to adapt to a new interface, they're likely to find holes in the available data. Beyond their data, they connect the financial industry over Bloomberg chat, so it's got the network effect there. The hardware itself is not a huge factor IMO. Plenty of people use Bloomberg terminals, via Bloomberg Anywhere, logging in from their standard desktop with their normal Windows keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER53> It's like Emacs or VIM for financial market professionals.

</comment><comment><USER54> There are some good answers here about why BBG has become the de facto information tool for folks who work in finance. Speaking as someone who works in finance -- there are, in my opinion, opportunities to dethrone BBG, but the most effective attack vectors will be more niche markets where information can be easily digitized, organized, and presented in a way that beats BBG's interface.

I work with municipal bonds - long story short, the muni market is a fixed income market with several legal and structural characteristics which add complexity over the corporate and government bond markets.

For example - generally municipal bonds are structured with serial maturities and a 10 year par call option, which means issuers are constantly refinancing, paying bonds down with cash, etc. This introduces complexity around _even knowing what bonds an issuer still has outstanding_. To someone who works with corporates, you'd just pull up the ticker and immediately see what's there - for our market, it takes a lot of manual effort to track the bonds, digitize old documents, and present that information in a logical interface.

(Similar to the SEC's EDGAR, there is an information repository for the municipal market called EMMA, which was introduced post-crisis - so it is fairly easy to pull recent disclosures, but very difficult to track older bonds/documents.)

On the investment banking side, we have one Bloomberg terminal for our entire floor, since the subscription is fairly expensive and we don't have as much need for the info as the traders do. If a company were to simply track information about municipal bonds, starting with the largest issuers, they could undercut Bloomberg in this market and make a good chunk of subscription revenue.

I have to imagine these opportunities exist elsewhere as well. I doubt that there are many folks who use BBG functions for more than the handful of markets in which they participate. I bet that there are markets where smaller companies could do just as good a job as BBG at gathering information for a lower cost.

A thought I just had while typing this comment - to me, BBG seems analogous to a cable TV bundle, where you pay for a ton of channels that you don't use. I wonder if competing against BBG in single markets would motivate them to introduce tiered/a la carte subscription models? The one feature keeping everyone on Bloomberg is chat (and to a certain extent, the actual trading platform) - in my case, if we could have that while only subscribing to a few functions, that would probably be enough for us and could save on subscription costs.

</comment><comment><USER35> Network effects especially for the chat function. Most of other functions are easily replicated by by Reuters Thompson, one of Bloomberg's competitors.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think there are a few reasons that keeps them at the top of the heap vs. their nearest competitors (S&P CapIQ, Factset, Thompson/Reuters).

One if Mike Bloomberg himself. He is a rarity. He is a founder who is still very active in the company. He certainly doesn't need to go to work every day for the money. He is worth billions and is 75. I think he genuinely loves the work and he demands the same work ethic from those around him. I would imagine that when he is in the building, you can "feel" it in the air. That gravitas that was frequently on display when he was mayor of NYC is probably there every day whenever he holds court on a topic.

Second, I believe Bloomberg has grown organically. I think it's much easier to present a complete and consistent system when you've built most of it yourself. A company like TR has been built up through acquisitions and it at times shows in the product. Factset has adopted a similar strategy as of late.

Third, while the product at times has a distinctive UI/UX experience, it has always seemed super fast at least to my eyes. Less is true of their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER56> You are looking at this from a computer engineer's point of view (perhaps). However if you look at it from the world of finance, access to a data broker with up to date(seconds) information where you can also chat with major bank traders and hedge funds the package is very complete.

Data brokers. Not a regular thing in comp.sci, but very much so in the world of finance.

<comment><USER57> I don't think you've answered the question of why custom hardware is required. All of the information resources and channels you mention could be accessed from more common hardware.

<comment><USER37> Apart from the keyboard, a present day Bloomberg is just a common PC and monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Point of clarification: Bloomberg does not _require_ special hardware to use, though they do _offer_ special hardware that integrates well with the software. At the time I left finance, I used a regular off-the-shelf PC with Dell monitors and a Das Keyboard, and it ran all the software I used on a daily basis (Bloomberg, Office, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER59> Interesting read on Bloomberg vs Symphony (through an EU policy lens, but has a lot of details about BBG business model I hadn't read elsewhere) [http://www.politico.eu/article/bloomberg-vs-the- banks/](http://www.politico.eu/article/bloomberg-vs-the-banks/)

<comment><USER60> I worked on Thomson Reuters Messenger, which Symphony tried hiring ex-Thomson people to work on. Symphony is a joke and will never gain any traction in any market. Bloomberg is the king, and if you don't have money you use Reuters. Otherwise your probably not very high end on finance.

<comment><USER61> Could you please elaborate on "Symphony is a joke"? Based on the little that I've read about it, it's pricing structure and the slew of mega banks behind it seem to make it a good choice for Terminal customers who use it just for the chat (IB) functionality. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Well, the monopoly aspect has had a limiting effect on a few things I've been involved in, at least in government/quasi-government. Given that some data series I've used are only (? or most conveniently) available through the terminal, it has meant having only half-automated tools. You always still need to do a weekly walk down the hall to a terminal followed by a lengthy boot-up on an old box, entering of password, opening of spreadsheet. They tend to lock down those machines too.

While I guess there are APIs, I don't get the impression they're easy to just integrate into any old workflow if the terminal is down the hall or even on the other side of your desk. It's all linked to that terminal, no? Pretty annoying if you ask me, from a programmers standpoint. Not to mention another case of closed, proprietary tech in the financial sector.

<comment><USER63> In many cases it is not Bloomberg's monopoly but the data provider's. The licensing and royalty agreements between Bloomberg and the data provider have very onerous terms including restricting how many screens the data can be displayed on, what mediums the data can be transferred to, and where and for what purpose the data can be used. The terminal restrictions and API limitations that Bloomberg imposes are usually driven by these concerns.

Bloomberg offers less restrictive APIs but they are even more costly than a terminal license and often require the end user to sign agreements with the data providers directly and pay additional royalties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> You've had lots of answers but I have a few other points that are worthy to mention...

The #1 key / function on a Bloomberg terminal is the Message key. Just like people are on Facebook because other people are on FB and not MySpace is the driver behind BB's message function. Bloomberg messages are key for relationship maintenance and informal (or even semi-formal) information exchange.

BB is a little hard to learn how to use because of all the special keys and function short codes. But because of those special keys and functions, once you are trained, the system is blazing fast to operate. Blazing fast in a trading environment is especially important to grumpy trading staff.

Which gets us to deal capture... so with the BB messaging system being so popular and in the early days being used to talk about deals, Bloomberg created a deal capture element to the system. So in addition to chatting with your street counterpart, you could formally confirm the deal you just messaged with your buddy. So take the social, add the deal capture, and add the fast & reliable, you have a damn good vanilla dealing system with zero overhead beyond monthly terminal cost, which you are paying anyway.

Unlike Reuters market data client-side infrastructure, BB terminal implementation requires low technical knowledge. Leased line and a black box communications server and bango you are up and running. Reuters, you need multiple Unix servers, so you need a Unix admin plus 1 more guy in case Unix admin #1 goes on holiday, plus leased lines, plus the comms equipment, plus this and plus that.

My old firm had 1 employee dedicated to untangling Reuters bills as there were user costs, systems as data user costs, depreciation costs, real time data costs, blah blah blah. Reuters billing had elements of self-auditing and internal real time data subscription management. BB bills are a list of BB terminal IDs which are easily mapped to user X and department Y. BB real time data feed costs are tied to specific user. You could process a Bloomberg invoice in 30 minutes with a temp staff.

</comment><comment><USER25> You are not paying for the hardware, you're paying for the platform and data. The monitor is a regular monitor (and I think it's only marginally used). The keyboard has a few extra keys which are convenient but not absolutely required (you can also use Bloomberg on a laptop).

</comment><comment><USER65> Longtime user of Bloomberg here, both finance and coding experience.

You no longer need special hardware to use the terminal. In fact the special keys are just mappings to your F keys, and you'll know which one is which without the keyboard. They have a sticker strip if you really need it. BTW the keyboard is crap, the buttons aren't balanced meaning the keys kinda stick, making you type slower.

Data is the only reason you need this thing. It's truly comprehensive how many data sources are all accessible through a single syntax. I've traded single stocks, corporate bonds, CDS, ETFs, index options, equity options, commodity futures, government bonds, interest rate swaps, IR swaptions, FX, FX options, and so on. You can get a price chart for all of them just by typing in a code followed by "GP". Or you can get relevant news.

On the API side, it's pretty easy to pull the data you need from the terminal. There's .NET, python, java, etc libraries for you, with lots of examples. And just about every imaginable field is there.

Bloomberg Chat is useful in certain parts of the industry. You can have all your brokers set up with individual 1-on-1 chats, yet still blast out a quote request as in "USD 5Y, 100K dv01, please" and they will all see it without knowing how many people you're talking to. A lot of people are still trading in the stone age, and Bloomberg is certified for keeping records for this sort of thing. You might have heard about BBG Chat in the recent LIBOR trials.

There's also a whole pseudo-exchange functionality. Basically you can get approved to get prices from each broker, and then you can trade with them by sending them tickets via Bloomberg. I always thought that was crap, but some people like it, depends on their niche.

It's kinda ripe for disruption though. 24K is a lot for the basic package, and if you want to actually get the data, rather than just the interface into it, you have to pay the underlying provider. That gets pricy quite quickly. Also live data costs money, too, and it's not going to be fast. Unless you get the leased line (if you're in the City of London, it's not a problem), which is more money again. And not especially fast, since there's an extra hop. I'm not sure I buy the argument that finance professionals know how to use it, so bbg is entrenched. If you understand what you're looking for, you're not going to have a problem finding it on some other system. For a lot of things such as common stocks, Yahoo and Google are not going to have any less information.

I've never thought highly of bloomberg's customer service. At most they're useful for discovering functions that you don't know the shortcut for. When there's anything remotely complicated, they seem to do a huge internal goose chase and then eventually get back to you with "can't do it". Basically anything API related, the Help Help guys will not know what to do and end up waiting for a dev. Also the official account manager keeps changing and every time you get a new one they pester you to show you some obscure functionality.

<comment><USER25> > For a lot of things such as common stocks, Yahoo and Google are not going to > have any less information.

This makes me wonder how much should I trust everything else you said...

<comment><USER66> Why do you say this?

(FWIW, I find many of lordnacho's HN contributions to be decent and in many cases insightful).

<comment><USER25> There are lots of things on bloomblerg that cannot be found at google or yahoo... To name only a few: intraday market data, company filings, detailed/processed financial information (product/geographic segmentation, non-gaap metrics), transcripts of earnings calls, sell-side estimates, corporate actions (M&A, IPOs/secondary offerings), information about management, customers, suppliers, institutional shareholders...

<comment><USER65> Bloomberg only keeps its intraday data for 50 days. Google does have intraday data, but you need to know how to get it via the right http call.

[https://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NYSE%3AXOM&ei=X2uzWInZGYa...](https://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NYSE%3AXOM&ei=X2uzWInZGYadUeC- ltgO)

There's the board of Exxon Mobil, along with links to analyst estimates, company filings, related firms, calendar of their calls, transcripts, list of institutional shareholders, and so on.

Most of the things you mention are certainly easier to find on a terminal, but you can get them for free elsewhere. Also don't forget many things on Bloomberg require you to pay even more. Short interest data on European stocks for instance.

<comment><USER25> I don't know how to get the intraday data from Google, do you also get 50 days, quotes, trades, volumes traded...? There is some useful info in the reuters.com page linked from google. But still there are so many things that are not there. There is only very basic financial info, and I don't think you get it in google finance within minutes of it being published. Of course you could read the press release for free. And read every filing from the company yourself, and every filing from any related company, and from any asset manager who might have a relevant disclosure. And then you you can process all that data to put it in a comparable format. All for free!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Basically, there isn't just "news" as in stories -- there's tons of data that's annoying, hard or impossible to find without paying various parties for it and scraping it, which Bloomberg makes available in one place, sorted and sortable and searchable, and possible to import automatically into Excel. Eg., it's the most reliable source of dates, times, and data content for upcoming and past macroeconomic announcements and earnings announcements; you can fetch stock index components with their current weights in the basket; and you can graph all sorts of things against each other using their powerful graphing software.

</comment><comment><USER68> Chat. In other words: whoever matters is accessible through it. It's an integrated platform for trading that also includes 'social', you can do every bit of your workflow there -- communication, sales, research, trade.

</comment><comment><USER69> I worked there for quite a while. I'll try to address some of your specific questions directly.

> it's just a portal that gives the news

A portal? Bloomberg News has its very own reporters (and jourobots). They investigate and write original content. People usually don't buy the terminal (~2000 USD/month) only for that, but if they do, they can read everything directly in the terminal.

> What I don't get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard?

The monitor is, these days, only about branding. Ten to fifteen years ago, Bloomberg offered good-quality LCD screens with integrated mounting arms for 2 or 4, at a time when that was a pretty high-end setup. As LCD screens became cheap and ubiquitous, many users don't have the Bloomberg ones, but they still have the Bloomberg keyboard. It's useful because it has special labels for a few hotkeys, plus some of them have extras like fingerprint readers. If you lack the special keyboard you can press Alt+K on any keyboard and the terminal will show you a graphic of the special keys for reference.

But to really understand why they have a special keyboard, you need to look back a good long while. That's covered here: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the- blo...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-bloomberg- terminal) \- the gist is that a "Bloomberg terminal" used to be a real terminal, connected to a magic box on the customer premises (which served several terminals). There have been many, many iterations of the terminal hardware, from a dedicated proprietary box, to software running on Sparc workstations, to software running on Windows, with the keyboard becoming more like a PC keyboard around the turn of the century.

> is it a VPN

No. Traditionally, customers connect their terminals back to the Bloomberg service via leased lines (i.e. not the internet). But for many years now you have the option of using the internet, though not everyone wants that.

> The cost of the product is ridiculous.

The cost of the product is much less than what some customers would be willing to pay. Most customers pay about the same monthly fee, regardless of where they are in the world, regardless of their corporate income statement, etc. So yes, it seems expensive to people who wouldn't get that much out of it. Some schools get a discount.

> Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware?

Bloomberg does not require specialized hardware at all. You can install it on any Windows laptop, and you are more than welcome to do so. As for cheaper-- yes, there are lots of things which are cheaper, but you will be hard-pressed to find any combination of those which is still cheaper and yet does most of what Bloomberg does (i.e. has similar quantity and quality of data, and applications built up).

> I know Bloomberg is a politician

He is now, but he was not when his company went from 0 users to 100,000 users.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's got a network-effect moat. The terminal isn't just a way to get information. It's a communication platform for members of the financial industry. And all the people they want to talk to are already there.

</comment><comment><USER71> An alternative to Bloomberg Terminal, on the research side, is Tiingo, an amazing financial data portal. They ask that if you use it, you pay a minimum of $7 per month, though that is not currently enforced.

<comment><USER72> Founder of Tiingo.com - it made top 10 of HackerNews before ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762913))

Thanks for the mention! The goal is to help liberate financial data and make it accessible to everyone via tools and education. I've already gone where bloomberg doesn't, like a custom metrics creator for the screener, and the podcast is top-rated. Either way, I work my butt off because I want everybody to have access to the same tools I did.

Thank you for mentioning the platform :) let me know if you have any questions! [https://www.tiingo.com](https://www.tiingo.com)

<comment><USER73> The one thing that's somewhat unavailable to me is bond data. Any plans in that space?

For example, Planet Money's toxic asset CUISP: 41161PUA9, part of HVMLT 2005-10 B6. I'd be neat to have visibility into that without paying bloomberg 20k.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> It seems as if there's a lot of behind the scenes data aggregation and analytics, which is good. But surely somebody has created a cheap variation on the rest of it? I.e. software with keystrokes to quickly access open financial data? I mean there's nothing to stop someone doing that, getting custom keyboards made, and selling it for a tiny fraction of the price right?

I'd imagine that there are quite a lot of people who fancy trading as something of a hobby but who will never pay for Bloomberg.

<comment><USER75> There's Eikon from Thomson Reuters, which is considerably cheaper

<comment><USER76> I don't know if I'd say considerably. It all depends on what data you need. They have more fine-grained purchases than Bloomberg though, so it can be cheaper, depending on your use-case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> The most important thing is it's ubiquitous in Finance. If everyone has it, it's very hard for someone else to introduce a competitor that others don't have.

It's also got an interface that everyone is used to. Not a great interface, but one that everyone knows.

There are cheaper alternatives, as well as easier to use alternatives, and alternatives with better analytics. But in general they just layer above BBG, they don't replace it.

</comment><comment><USER78> This podcast will shed some light on your query: [http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/podcast-wall-streets- just...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/podcast-wall-streets-just-one-big- bloomberg-chat/)

 _"Bloomberg just wants you to be locked into the ecosystem and never, ever leave. It's like the Hotel California of financial data." — Robin Wigglesworth_

</comment><comment><USER79> The depth and breadth of financial data along with excellent integration with Excel is simply unmatched! I actually looked into alternatives a couple of times and each time didn't find anything even close! There're a lot of rivals though including Factset that have great products but nothing really comes close to Bloomberg especially if you have to work with FI instruments.

</comment><comment><USER80> Things might be different now, but Bloomberg used to be unique in what it offered:fixed income price feeds, analytics, news feeds and messaging service for market participants.

Another killer feature was that there were addins to excel spreadsheets.

Now, there are probably competing products, but Bloomberg has a large user base who are very familiar with its product.

</comment><comment><USER81> [https://youtu.be/_juj1MIRJVE](https://youtu.be/_juj1MIRJVE)

</comment><comment><USER82> Dealers need bbg, the social network in bbg chat drives some network effects, there's also a bit of tradition involved too. They tend to have less data issues than most but there's plenty still there.

Analysts and research roles aren't so beholden but bbg does data well while reuters does news well.

</comment><comment><USER83> My friends at Intrinio ([https://intrinio.com/](https://intrinio.com/)) here in St. Pete FL are responding to this question with a lower-cost, developer- friendly way to pull financial data into Excel, Google Sheets or your own application.

</comment><comment><USER84> i think it's a locked down software system that provides near real time data on in various financial markets around the world. the reason why this is useful is alot of stock info you find online is 5 -15 minutes old.. which is kind of useless if you need to buy and sell in realtime.

</comment><comment><USER85> Wow, great comments about Bloomberg. It makes me wonder, is there similar system for Cryptocoins traders?

<comment><USER86> This is a really interesting idea. Certainly, there's a huge need in the cryptocurrency world with getting information accurately and in one place. And it's only going to grow.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b I'm a quant developer and have had Bloomberg terminal for years. Bloomberg has a lot of different benefits.

1\. It is a all-in-one news source. There are a lot of features that allow you to monitor the news from many different sources in real time.

2\. It is a social network. The built-in chat and email service is _really_ basic. But, just about every one working in Finance is on it, with their contact details and resumes. As a trader, you can legally close financial transactions on the Bloomberg chat, as one would over the phone.

3\. It is a data sharing platform. Banks and other market participants contribute to Bloomberg data by sending information that is normally not visible in the market. For instance FX volatilities are quoted by banks on bloomberg in real time. This information is only available in few places.

4\. It is an API that allows its users to use its data for custom analytics.

5\. It is an execution platform, where you can book trades, follow their values and risk when the market moves, etc.

6\. It is open to 3rd parties: some banks and other data vendors have their own pages on bloomberg (which I never had access to).

7\. It has many many other stuffs. There is a restaurant review system. There is a classified section. There are things to monitor the weather. It has videos, maps, it's just huge.

Now - that is what people are interested in.

And then there are the things that Bloomberg shoves down your throat. Like the keyboard.

Bloomberg _forces_ you to buy their keyboards, at a very heavy price. The justification is the fingerprint reader, but that's really just a scam, because they put a $10 fingerprint reader onto a $10 keyboard, and sell you the thing at $500 a piece. So you either need to buy the keyboard, or you need to buy the B-Unit, which is Bloomberg very 2-factor authentication device which I assume is also quite expensive.

There is also the additional price you pay for API access, or to be able to see very specialized data. You pay for your private circuit to their servers (yep, it usually doesn't go through the internet).

Also a few words on the UI: it is f-ing terrible. Hit Escape, and you will find yourself on the start page. It doesn't matter that you were in the middle of typing an email or pricing a product, it just restarts your terminal. Most of the features are accessed by obscure four letter codes, that one has to learn to go back to. There is a search feature but everything is mixed in, and so you have to be pretty lucky to find anything useful using that. After a while though, the fact that the UI is so bad makes you feel "part of the club", I think many people would hate it if it changed.

</comment><comment><USER87> It's not the terminal pet se, it's the information it is connected to.

</comment><comment><USER88> Does anyone here know how difficult it would be for BBL to change their GUI? I am using the terminal quite often, but I wish it would be more EIKON like.

</comment><comment><USER89> It's not mostly news, it's mostly finance data that only Bloomberg has aggregated. To get the data you have to buy the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER90> Is it possible to access the bloomberg terminal chat via some sort of api?

</comment><comment><USER91> Try:

$ apt install wallstreet

$ wallstreet

I created that for Ubuntu, as a follow-on to:

$ apt install hollywood

$ hollywood

Purely for fun. Try it!

<comment><USER92> where's the source ? can't find it

<comment><USER93> "wallstreet" is part of his "hollywood" project: [https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood/blob/master/bin/...](https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood/blob/master/bin/wallstreet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> By way of an introduction: My name is Alap Shah and I spent years as an analyst at Viking and Citadel using Bloomberg and CapIQ in my day-to-day workflow. 5 years ago, I left to begin building Sentieo, a modern financial platform underpinned by deep search that incorporates the latest in web technology.

My team of former buy-side analysts and engineers have built an advanced research platform with search technology and data analytics designed to significantly increase the speed and depth of your research process.

Sentieo aims to help accelerate fundamental investors' workflow by picking up where traditional financial platforms leave off:

• Quickly search through public company documents: Sentieo's Document Search is the fastest and most powerful way to search through millions of SEC filings, international filings, broker research, transcripts and presentations.

• Effortlessly organize your research: Sentieo offers research management seamlessly integrated at its core. The Sentieo Notebook is where your investment ideas begin to take shape---analysts organize and develop their ideas while allowing Portfolio Managers to monitor and influence the ongoing development of an investment thesis.

• The financial data terminal reimagined: Sentieo offers a modern take on the data terminal, with a sleek design that facilitates easy consumption of relevant financial metrics, statements, charts and more. In addition, the Excel plugin provides access to all of Sentieo's datasets in Excel.

• A visualization engine built for analysts: Plotter, our powerful visualization engine, allows you to create and track complex graphs for data series across any number of tickers, with customizable financial metrics for each ticker. In addition, Sentieo's Mosaic tool adds a powerful additional piece to your data mosaic: alternative data on web traffic, search interest, and Twitter mentions. Seamlessly overlay that data against our financial datasets to quickly identify the opportunities where data has predictive power in forecasting unreported revenue and earnings growth. Our user interface presents all of this data in a manner that's easy to analyze.

• Sentieo's power in your pocket: Our suite of mobile apps enables intuitive and fast access to the Sentieo platform while on the road (e.g. at investment conferences and 1-on-1s). Integrated note-taking allows for collaboration with others at your firm, with notes seamlessly syncing with our cloud servers once your mobile device regains wireless Internet access.

After years of development, we launched just over a year ago and already have 200+ hedge funds and sell-side shops subscribed to our equity research platform. Our team numbers nearly 100 strong across San Francisco, New York and New Delhi.

I'd be more than glad to walk you through Sentieo, its unique features, and our approach to being at the forefront of trends in:

• Financial search technology

• Research management systems (RMS)

• How funds are using a host of new datasets to generate Alpha via web traffic, search volumes and twitter mentions

• Predictive analytic tools that allow analysts to make better forecasts of business performance and to generate Alpha

Please feel free to visit our website is at www.sentieo.com to get a glimpse of how we are re-imagining the financial data terminal and re-defining how fintech can aid analysts in improving their workflow and generating investment insights.

Cheers,

Alap

<comment><USER95> This comment seems kinda spammy (not to mention the fact that it's appeared and reappeared at least 3 times so far). It would appear less so to me if it were _much_ shorter and _much_ lighter on the marketing speak. Just a quick, maybe 5 sentence introduction and a link would suffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> If anybody is looking to disrupt the industry, I would be interested to partner in.

<comment><USER97> Bloomberg would be very hard to dethrone. It's key selling point is all of the data they have access to, which takes forever to setup integration with all of those providers. They continually expand data sources as well so it's not like they are asleep at the wheel.

Finally, Bloomberg chat has strong network effects so even if you had all of the same data, many traders still wouldn't switch to you because they can't communicate with others still on Bloomberg.</comment></comment>