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

This is fascinating to be because I always assumed latency was the key. After all, the only Bloomberg terminal I've ever seen in person was hooked up to its own dedicated fiber drop. It seems like the chat and sheer breadth of data are the differentiators.

▲ mattnewton 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

TIL Bloomberg terminal is the original iMessage blue bubbles network

▲ pizzalife 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's funny to think some of the world's largest trades are being done in something that resembles a game's tradechat. (WTS bonds)

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lq9AJ8yrfs 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

For a long time fixed income trading took place over AOL Instant Messenger and later Yahoo chat rooms.

I am not making this up.

There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.

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globular-toast 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I find it a bit less funny. There is this perception that what finance people do is super important and grown up but following a brief stint in the industry I realised it literally is just a game. We used to trade bits of stationery and trading cards for fun at school. They never stopped. The only difference is people who never consented to any of this are paying for it all, especially when it all goes wrong.

	▲	allthetime 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That should have been obvious from the mere fact that the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies.

▲ tikhonj an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Bloomberg is big enough that different aspects of the system are going to be absolutely key for substantial subsets of its customers.

	▲	steveBK123 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes its a multi-decade long-tail of thousands and thousands of use cases all used in different combinations by different users.