I used a Bloomberg terminal for years and years, both as a user and as a coder.
- It's quite convenient for business side people. I used it to trade all sorts of things (FI, credit, equities, fx, derivs on all those) and there was always some convenient function you could type in to give you a calculator for whatever it was. Whatever derivatives model you found in a textbook, you could find it in the terminal. With relevant data loaded in.
- Data is convenient too. Once you know how to work the API, you can pull a huge amount of data. A lot of it is available elsewhere, but nowhere has so much in one place, in one API.
- They are very serious about you not sharing the terminal or the data. Obviously once you have the data in a text file, they can't do much about that, but they do limit the amount you can download, and then they phone you once you trigger something. Sounds like a warning, but also a sales call at the same time.
- It's not so easy to share the terminal itself. The standard tricks like installing it on a VM, or installing remote desktop / VNC won't work. I'm sure someone has figured it out, but it's not as easy as sharing most other software services. They'd be fine with a small business sharing a terminal though, as long as it stayed on one machine that different staff would take turns on. And in case you thought a Bloomberg Anywhere would solve it for your distributed team, that used to use a special biometric device. Not sure if it's still there.
- Chats I'm guessing are not nearly as interesting as a few years ago, before the revelations about what was being said. I never got much gossip, but it really depends on where you're sitting in the market. You can use them as a replacement for voice trading, and everything is recorded. And it warns you if you're about to send a swear word, heh.
- A lot of small firms use the terminal to trade directly with counterparties, there's a whole OTC infrastructure in there. I never used it much but all the banks had their own Bloomberg pages for doing trades in all sorts of things with them.
- In terms of infrastructure, you can get a dedicated line for your bbg, they come and stick some stuff into your rack. This can fail over to internet if you want, simply a matter of changing the config on the app and phoning them. Also IIRC you can get a special data server, depending on whether the guy above scared you into buying one.
- The help function is for users, not coders. You'll wait for ages while the agent on the helpdesk figures out that he doesn't understand your problem if you're a coder. If not he'll find the business function you're after quite fast. Every time I got through to a dev about something that needed to be changed, it went into a suggestions queue and stayed there.
- It's quite convenient for business side people. I used it to trade all sorts of things (FI, credit, equities, fx, derivs on all those) and there was always some convenient function you could type in to give you a calculator for whatever it was. Whatever derivatives model you found in a textbook, you could find it in the terminal. With relevant data loaded in.
- Data is convenient too. Once you know how to work the API, you can pull a huge amount of data. A lot of it is available elsewhere, but nowhere has so much in one place, in one API.
- They are very serious about you not sharing the terminal or the data. Obviously once you have the data in a text file, they can't do much about that, but they do limit the amount you can download, and then they phone you once you trigger something. Sounds like a warning, but also a sales call at the same time.
- It's not so easy to share the terminal itself. The standard tricks like installing it on a VM, or installing remote desktop / VNC won't work. I'm sure someone has figured it out, but it's not as easy as sharing most other software services. They'd be fine with a small business sharing a terminal though, as long as it stayed on one machine that different staff would take turns on. And in case you thought a Bloomberg Anywhere would solve it for your distributed team, that used to use a special biometric device. Not sure if it's still there.
- Chats I'm guessing are not nearly as interesting as a few years ago, before the revelations about what was being said. I never got much gossip, but it really depends on where you're sitting in the market. You can use them as a replacement for voice trading, and everything is recorded. And it warns you if you're about to send a swear word, heh.
- A lot of small firms use the terminal to trade directly with counterparties, there's a whole OTC infrastructure in there. I never used it much but all the banks had their own Bloomberg pages for doing trades in all sorts of things with them.
- In terms of infrastructure, you can get a dedicated line for your bbg, they come and stick some stuff into your rack. This can fail over to internet if you want, simply a matter of changing the config on the app and phoning them. Also IIRC you can get a special data server, depending on whether the guy above scared you into buying one.
- The help function is for users, not coders. You'll wait for ages while the agent on the helpdesk figures out that he doesn't understand your problem if you're a coder. If not he'll find the business function you're after quite fast. Every time I got through to a dev about something that needed to be changed, it went into a suggestions queue and stayed there.