Great piece! I used to work there many years ago and the culture is fascinating. Just a relentless focus on cramming as much value into the terminal as possible. The sticker price may seem high but as you note it is mission critical and arguably trivial compared to what’s at stake for their target customers - e.g. you are paying your traders millions, so $25K/year or whatever the going rate is, is not really a factor.
Talent mentality is also interesting. Maybe things have changed, but it my day it was bare minimum 10 interviews to get in the door and then weeks of classroom training before you could touch anything. And then more ongoing training for as long as you are there.
An analogy might be a pro sports franchise - a maniacal focus on the best talent and obsession with winning.
Yes their hiring and sales practices need a separate mention. Would love to collect some first hand stories from ex-employees if a few are willing to come forward. Would love to pack it up into a follow on note.
Great overview. I first saw Bloomberg terminals appearing in the '80s the hardware was very futuristic-looking indeed.
Your comments on their service levels are spot-on. For the per-seat price they'd better be ;-) In fact, their high price has turned out to be a sort of Giffen Good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good , with an aspirational element that is almost unmatched.
Like the HP-12C financial calculator, the arcane user interface (it still looks very old-school") becomes a bit of a "secret handshake club".
Another key lock-in element over time is their introduction of integrated trading systems. Once that's chosen as a firm-wide standard, the switching costs become prohibitive indeed.
This is an impressive masterclass, truly an expert review on Bloomberg (I work for one of their numerous competitors so a must read for sure!) Thanks for the huge effort putting all of this research together.
Thanks JoseMaria, there is plenty more to come so do get out the word to your colleagues/ network. Keen to be covering more businesses in my writing. My second post cover MSCI, Facset and CME. Hope you enjoy that too.
Thank you Feisal for the kind words. I'm just another bloke from the industry who wants to break it down for the curious. Felt like no one was catering to this fascinating yet opaque market.
Will take you up on the coffee if I'm able to get to five articles with similar critical reception 🙏🏼
I am an instant subscriber after reading your well-researched and incredibly comprehensive piece about something I use for almost 30 years (I am a fund manager by background). Your statistics they have 15,000 features but average users use 29 made me fall off the chair. I always told my rep I know but less than 5% of the functions.
I wish they provide much easier graphing capability - they do everything superbly just not graphing.
They can also improve on private equity and credit data - that would be a terrific moat!
Glad you enjoyed it. Share it with other users of the Terminal, there is more layers to this onion I'll be unpacking :)
They've missed the boat on building moats in private equity and private credit data due to their target market. The terminal started off as a sell-side product, and that's where it captures most value. So the focus has always been on increasing moats in sell-side workflows. The buy-side that then adopted it came from the sell-side customers who needed a similar solution - hedge funds, active asset managers etc. Not PE/PC investors. So that customer segment and related datasets were ignored...
Great piece, the depth of the analysis is quite remarkable. I am very happy to see people write about the financial data ecosystem, which is quite vast and complex yet there is a lack of resources on the topic. I recently published a book with O’Reilly on financial data engineering and I dedicated Chapter 2 to the financial data landscape. I wish I could read your articles before publishing my book. I'll share it on Linkedin
Hi Tamer, mighty undertaking publishing the book. So congrats! I’ve flipped through the TOC and it put a smile on my face. It’s great to see how much you have covered. My writing is more of an appetizer into the industry, I think you’ve got the main course. I’ll be touching on some of the topics in your book in future posts, so may reach out to you to collaborate. On tri-party agreements, its when a client, third-party vendor and data provider agree that the third-party is not a consumer of the data, just a software provider for the end tooling with the client consuming the data and the tool. This reduces the need for the TP vendor to pay for data consumption at its simplest.
It’s incredible that many of the modern tropes of enterprise SaaS startups - cloud, network effects, vertical market software, land-and-expand growth - are exemplified by Bloomberg 4 decades ago.
Who are you ? Coffee and dinner on me wherever and whenever you want . Not only spot on , but your knowledge of Bloomberg innards , especially about bond pricing, a key advantage, is insightful and accurate. No bond trader in his right mind would use anything but a Bloomberg terminal. Ask any of them . Game over since the 2000s. Stock data is free . Not so bond data . Bloomberg owns data and analysis of bonds . All bonds . Bigger than the stock market . Bloomberg rocks
Fantastic article, the most accurate and in depth analysis I’ve seen. Having run market data organisations in T1 banks I’ve seen the power of BBG in action and have experienced first hand the fun of being told to by the business management to reduce the BBG spend and cancel terminals, only to watch them wind it back when the traders come walking in with pitch forks.
Roberts comment on a follow up regarding Eikons failure (I saw that too) is interesting, but even more interesting (to me at least) is why TR/Refinitiv tried so hard. The article talks about the strength of the BBG tickerplant and internally at BBG that may be true but it certainly was NOT true inside the banks. BBG owned the desktop but it was TR/Refinitiv that owned the server side enterprise real time market data feed space. BPIPE was slow, expensive and hard to implement, TREP (RTDS today I believe) ruled the roost - always felt that TR missed this point entirely and could have made far more revenue than BBG did by doubling down on the enterprise market data space, rather than burning time and money chasing the terminal.
Banks also built their own tickerplants for real time analytics and quant research but that’s another entire series of articles in it’s own right.
Astute observation on TR missing the boat on enterprise feeds. Many factors went wrong simultaneously. Part of it was FOMO before there was fomo. BBG got all the attention and owned the front office. Traders geeked out over BBG hotkeys, only market data mangers could geek out on TREP. Every rainmaker wanted a Terminal. Reactionary management at TR necessitated a response much like Microsoft (under Balmer) trying to launch the Windows phone in response to iPhone. Only diff was that MSFT realized (under Nadella) enterprise apps & server was their edge & nixed the phone to doubled down on software. TR, RFT and now LSEG are still languishing in no-man’s land with Eikon and its spawns. It appears that they are yet to appreciate the trade-offs in product dev & tech architecture to achieve success on two delivery modals. This resulted in terrible matrix organization that delivered on neither front and led to high executive churn. And continues to do so, just unannounced.
A great case study in its own right, and one in the cards for H1 2025. Would love to get your inputs when i get down to it. DM me if you are interested!
Thanks so much - I’ve been hoping someone would write this for so long. Fingers crossed you stick at this, an interesting follow-up would be why Refinitiv Eikon didn’t take off - I have heard from old timers that they just couldn’t figure out the shortcuts as easily as the Bloomberg Terminal. My perception is that Refinitiv didn’t put as much effort on selling Eikon as Bloomberg did with the terminal.
Echoing the positive Bloomberg comments, anybody I’ve heard speak about the place says it’s an amazing place to work and the sales people are great.
Of course, it’s well documented before Michael Bloomberg came along, numerous American investment banks were trying to build their own versions of what became the Terminal.
Great piece! I used to work there many years ago and the culture is fascinating. Just a relentless focus on cramming as much value into the terminal as possible. The sticker price may seem high but as you note it is mission critical and arguably trivial compared to what’s at stake for their target customers - e.g. you are paying your traders millions, so $25K/year or whatever the going rate is, is not really a factor.
Talent mentality is also interesting. Maybe things have changed, but it my day it was bare minimum 10 interviews to get in the door and then weeks of classroom training before you could touch anything. And then more ongoing training for as long as you are there.
An analogy might be a pro sports franchise - a maniacal focus on the best talent and obsession with winning.
Yes their hiring and sales practices need a separate mention. Would love to collect some first hand stories from ex-employees if a few are willing to come forward. Would love to pack it up into a follow on note.
Great overview. I first saw Bloomberg terminals appearing in the '80s the hardware was very futuristic-looking indeed.
Your comments on their service levels are spot-on. For the per-seat price they'd better be ;-) In fact, their high price has turned out to be a sort of Giffen Good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good , with an aspirational element that is almost unmatched.
Like the HP-12C financial calculator, the arcane user interface (it still looks very old-school") becomes a bit of a "secret handshake club".
Another key lock-in element over time is their introduction of integrated trading systems. Once that's chosen as a firm-wide standard, the switching costs become prohibitive indeed.
This is an incredible piece of research and analysis. I think it’s the most perceptive piece I’ve ever read about Bloomberg. Please keep writing!
Thank you Gabriel. Like you I’m hoping it isn’t a one-hit wonder :D Next article will be out before the end of the month hopefully.
This is an impressive masterclass, truly an expert review on Bloomberg (I work for one of their numerous competitors so a must read for sure!) Thanks for the huge effort putting all of this research together.
Thanks JoseMaria, there is plenty more to come so do get out the word to your colleagues/ network. Keen to be covering more businesses in my writing. My second post cover MSCI, Facset and CME. Hope you enjoy that too.
This is amazing . The best breakdown of a private, but legitimate behemoth.
Thank you Feisal for the kind words. I'm just another bloke from the industry who wants to break it down for the curious. Felt like no one was catering to this fascinating yet opaque market.
Will take you up on the coffee if I'm able to get to five articles with similar critical reception 🙏🏼
I am an instant subscriber after reading your well-researched and incredibly comprehensive piece about something I use for almost 30 years (I am a fund manager by background). Your statistics they have 15,000 features but average users use 29 made me fall off the chair. I always told my rep I know but less than 5% of the functions.
I wish they provide much easier graphing capability - they do everything superbly just not graphing.
They can also improve on private equity and credit data - that would be a terrific moat!
Thanks very much!
Glad you enjoyed it. Share it with other users of the Terminal, there is more layers to this onion I'll be unpacking :)
They've missed the boat on building moats in private equity and private credit data due to their target market. The terminal started off as a sell-side product, and that's where it captures most value. So the focus has always been on increasing moats in sell-side workflows. The buy-side that then adopted it came from the sell-side customers who needed a similar solution - hedge funds, active asset managers etc. Not PE/PC investors. So that customer segment and related datasets were ignored...
Great piece, the depth of the analysis is quite remarkable. I am very happy to see people write about the financial data ecosystem, which is quite vast and complex yet there is a lack of resources on the topic. I recently published a book with O’Reilly on financial data engineering and I dedicated Chapter 2 to the financial data landscape. I wish I could read your articles before publishing my book. I'll share it on Linkedin
Here is the link to my book if you are interested
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/financial-data-engineering/9781098159986/
Could you please illustrate the tri-party licensing process you mentioned?
Hi Tamer, mighty undertaking publishing the book. So congrats! I’ve flipped through the TOC and it put a smile on my face. It’s great to see how much you have covered. My writing is more of an appetizer into the industry, I think you’ve got the main course. I’ll be touching on some of the topics in your book in future posts, so may reach out to you to collaborate. On tri-party agreements, its when a client, third-party vendor and data provider agree that the third-party is not a consumer of the data, just a software provider for the end tooling with the client consuming the data and the tool. This reduces the need for the TP vendor to pay for data consumption at its simplest.
Thank you! I would be more than happy to collaborate on future content. I will be more active on Substack starting from next year
It’s incredible that many of the modern tropes of enterprise SaaS startups - cloud, network effects, vertical market software, land-and-expand growth - are exemplified by Bloomberg 4 decades ago.
Who are you ? Coffee and dinner on me wherever and whenever you want . Not only spot on , but your knowledge of Bloomberg innards , especially about bond pricing, a key advantage, is insightful and accurate. No bond trader in his right mind would use anything but a Bloomberg terminal. Ask any of them . Game over since the 2000s. Stock data is free . Not so bond data . Bloomberg owns data and analysis of bonds . All bonds . Bigger than the stock market . Bloomberg rocks
Tradeweb and Marketaxess have made meaningful inroads into the bond dominance of BBG. Worth a study how they achieved it.
Please enable audio
Look at Daloopa as solving a pain point that Bloomberg currently overlooks!
If memory serves the old middleware software company, TIBCO, was critical for their success building out the integration layer.
Fantastic article, the most accurate and in depth analysis I’ve seen. Having run market data organisations in T1 banks I’ve seen the power of BBG in action and have experienced first hand the fun of being told to by the business management to reduce the BBG spend and cancel terminals, only to watch them wind it back when the traders come walking in with pitch forks.
Roberts comment on a follow up regarding Eikons failure (I saw that too) is interesting, but even more interesting (to me at least) is why TR/Refinitiv tried so hard. The article talks about the strength of the BBG tickerplant and internally at BBG that may be true but it certainly was NOT true inside the banks. BBG owned the desktop but it was TR/Refinitiv that owned the server side enterprise real time market data feed space. BPIPE was slow, expensive and hard to implement, TREP (RTDS today I believe) ruled the roost - always felt that TR missed this point entirely and could have made far more revenue than BBG did by doubling down on the enterprise market data space, rather than burning time and money chasing the terminal.
Banks also built their own tickerplants for real time analytics and quant research but that’s another entire series of articles in it’s own right.
Great article, keep them coming.
Astute observation on TR missing the boat on enterprise feeds. Many factors went wrong simultaneously. Part of it was FOMO before there was fomo. BBG got all the attention and owned the front office. Traders geeked out over BBG hotkeys, only market data mangers could geek out on TREP. Every rainmaker wanted a Terminal. Reactionary management at TR necessitated a response much like Microsoft (under Balmer) trying to launch the Windows phone in response to iPhone. Only diff was that MSFT realized (under Nadella) enterprise apps & server was their edge & nixed the phone to doubled down on software. TR, RFT and now LSEG are still languishing in no-man’s land with Eikon and its spawns. It appears that they are yet to appreciate the trade-offs in product dev & tech architecture to achieve success on two delivery modals. This resulted in terrible matrix organization that delivered on neither front and led to high executive churn. And continues to do so, just unannounced.
A great case study in its own right, and one in the cards for H1 2025. Would love to get your inputs when i get down to it. DM me if you are interested!
Thanks so much - I’ve been hoping someone would write this for so long. Fingers crossed you stick at this, an interesting follow-up would be why Refinitiv Eikon didn’t take off - I have heard from old timers that they just couldn’t figure out the shortcuts as easily as the Bloomberg Terminal. My perception is that Refinitiv didn’t put as much effort on selling Eikon as Bloomberg did with the terminal.
Echoing the positive Bloomberg comments, anybody I’ve heard speak about the place says it’s an amazing place to work and the sales people are great.
Of course, it’s well documented before Michael Bloomberg came along, numerous American investment banks were trying to build their own versions of what became the Terminal.
Older threads on the same:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18029317
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13578936
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736009
2. https://mattturck.com/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-toppled/
3. https://www.netinterest.co/p/disrupting-bloomberg
4. https://www.tradersmagazine.com/uncategorized/you-cant-kill-the-bloomberg-terminal-but-if-you-were-going-to-try-heres-how/