Asked a dear friend in the finance industry what he thought about Bloomberg. He's the type of guy who uses these systems daily. Mostly paraphrasing:

  1) Bloomberg was lightyears ahead of anything else in the pre-internet days, so there's a lot of UI familiarity.

  2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"

  3) Bloomberg is the biggest and best aggregator

> They're paying for the data source

Yup.

If you want fixed-income data, Bloomberg is the only shop on the street data-wise.

If you want other financial data, Bloomberg's fixed entry-point pricing tends to make more sense in terms of bang for buck than its competitors modular price sheets.

People saying Bloomberg is just about the chat are simply embarrassing themselves.

Look at the price sheets of Eikon, Factset, CapIQ etc. There is no such thing as a cheap "Bloomberg killer".

Quality data is expensive. So are the leased-lines it arrives at Bloomberg on. So is the data wrangling architecture.

Financial companies are cutting down on the amount associates can bill the firm for a $30 dinner, and the time before they can have the firm pay for a $30 car ride home. They definitely wouldn't pay for Bloomberg if it could be easily replaced.

To be fair, I don't see anywhere on this page where they try to suggest that this is competitive with a Bloomberg terminal.

Correct. Also, Bloomberg has messaging for traders that is actually an important network effect in certain domains.

Good thing they're not asking $31,980 per year for it then?

> They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.

We keep seeing hundreds of Bloomberg competitors mimicking the interface and they always forget that the chat (with the connections), data and the newsroom are the reasons why Bloomberg's network effect is close to impossible to break.

Using the Bloomberg Terminal is taught very early at colleges for any finance professional, which is how they get them as well.

does the author claim to be a bloomberg clone?

Some of us are just here for the æsthetics! Plus I already have the SEA100 "Centerboard" with chrome accents, and this will help complete the look.

actually a lot of data is not included in the standard bloomberg license and you have to pay extra (mostly passing through to the data vendors) to get access to it.

There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.

it's a GUI and a TUI, pay attention to the screenshots