I really wish people would mention their stack when they have these curl install scripts. I'd rather use a real package manager, but I'm not totally against installing a compiled binary this way. I am, 100%, not going to install some Java/Type-script nightmare like this though. How is it resolving the dependencies? Is it installing some version of node, bun... on my machine? How's that working with other versions I have installed?
Related: please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages! Don't make the runtime your user's problem.
I don't know man, seems like a cool project and is open source. I guess he could have just sat on it and used for himself exclusively. It's auditable and totally fine for an open source project and nobody is forced to use it. It's free to use under the MIT license, what else can you really ask for.
I actually don't mean to bag on the author, but I think my complaint is valid. Maybe if they had a note right next to the curl command that said "This installs a single bun bundled executable. Here's a link to the GitHub releases if you'd like to install it yourself", that would be helpful.
My point about interpreted languages stands though. These bundled javascript runtime "apps" eat at least 500M of RAM on boot. That's totally not needed for a CLI tool. If it's not bundled, then it's even worse as you hit the supply chain and tooling interference problems (and you still use the same RAM). There are a lot of good, modern, compiled languages. CLI builders should pick up those stacks imho.
In case the author is, like so many people, sensitive to this kind of criticism, I will say this:
Thank you for giving the world your free software. Feel no compunction to undertake extra work to please people who criticize your work. They are not paying for your software and are not paying your bills. If your install eats enormous amounts of ram or uses a programming language they do not like, that is their problem. In your case for example they are free to get Bloomberg.
If you want to do free work to please critical people, ok. But I wouldn’t bother. Thank you for all the work you did to write your software and then the even more work you did to share it. I write my own software but don’t bother sharing it because it’s a lot of work, so I appreciate you.
Unless you're paying to turn on access to purely a third party feed (which would be odd to me) there's some server side code taking those feeds and that the app is calling. Is that server code MIT licensed?
An open source interface to a proprietary backend isn't really fully auditable.
The standard Linux CLI tools are installed by a package manager, which has addressed the issues raised upthread. Installs via curl | bash don’t automatically benefit from that.
This is how I found out it's a javascript project and didn't install it. I only even bothered to do that because I actually wanted to try it. I'm just saying it would be awesome to have that right there next to the curl command.
> Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
And I prefer not to use those. Everything I said for Javascript holds for Python, Perl, Ruby... as well.
I know where you're coming from. I've been worried about all the supply chain attacks on npm too. And I'm far from a security expert. However, if you're okay with installing binary packages via `curl somesite.com | sh` I don't think you are in a better position with regards to security.
Security is just one of my concerns. I'm actually more worried about borking my system because it's doing some out of band stuff with various javascript pieces that already exist on my system (not by my choice!).
I write command line tools primarily with Python and one thing I always try to do is to limit myself to the standard library, which, with Python, is quite sufficient for most of what I do.
Anyway, most of what I write is designed to be installed in a virtualenv, which restricts the blast radius to one specific application.
And in the GitHub release page they include compiled binaries anyway... Why would you advertise `curl | bash` as a way to install if there's a binary available?!
Download it, put it wherever you like (probably `~/.local/bin/`) and you're good to use it.
It seems to have become "the thing" to do. I can't figure out if it is bad as it feels. Why would I run `curl | bash` on something that could be doing literally anything. It feels crazy that all the lessons we've learned just get thrown away.
On the other hand, just because I run `brew install someapp`, it somehow feels safer, but why? That app could be doing anything too.
One thing I dislike is that the installer wants super user permissions. That’s a big no-no with JavaScript apps installing global components. All global machine state should be managed with package managers, preferably only one package manager.
You can, and you should eject your dependencies and package them with your releases. And I don't understand why it's not a common practice.
You can even bundle your releases with a runtime, but that's not always the best solution. For something like this I'd actually prefer interpreted code I can inspect line by line rather than having a blob of unknown origin.
I agree with you that the author of this project is catching a stray bullet, but I also have to agree with GP that `curl | bash` got way too out of hand.
I don't know where that came from but it should definitely disappear.
At least the developer includes the binaries for all platforms in the GitHub release page.
It's not crazy to prefer a package manager package to a curl|bash YOLO. OP is stating that preference, which various people have agreed with. If you posted "I love curl|bash install method - please do more of this" that is also fine. Either way it's a signal for both the author and anyone considering shipping this type of software, that their audience may have a certain preference.
100% agree. It's a fun name, but it ends up begging the comparison. The look and feel of it was an instant download for me. It's actually exactly what I want and even tried / failed to build on my own for years. I'll be supporting this project.
Yeah, I think a few of the widgets here are neat and useful. It's not a Bloomberg replacement, but it might be a good replacement for a few tabs? You could get the info elsewhere, but I like this presentation more.
Edit: Ah, they're offering a pro subscription. While I appreciate that cloud services aren't free, I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay to replace a few browser tabs. Not for me, but maybe for someone!
Yeah... people aren't paying Bloomberg $31,980 per year for a TUI. They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
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.
I've heard the same thing about Bloomberg's chat many years ago. Since everyone you're chatting to also has to fork over ~$30k/yr to use it, there's the implicit assumption that you're talking to a serious person.
Slack (acquired by Salesforce in 2021 for $27 billion) started out as a chat app built for the devs of a failing online multiplayer video game called Glitch.
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.
> the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies
You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
I know a lot of traders from both university and growing up around rich kids. Their parents are invariably very wealthy. They were the ones who had the time and safety net to sit around on computers all the time (like me becoming a programmer)
I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description.
But exactly zero of the people I know who were raised in either poverty or mediocrity are traders or involved in finance, aside from maybe accounting.
Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children.
Perhaps things were a bit different decades ago, in the scrappy past, but it feels like most higher earning spheres are closing in around pre-existing wealth.
I was. Algorithmic derivatives. The rich kids went into banking. Their connections bought deal flow. Those of us from public universities mostly went into trading. It’s why it’s been looked down on within Wall Street since basically ever.
> I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children
Parents buying their kids Bloomberg terminals aren’t looking for them to get into trading, they’re training them to start a hedge fund.
(I’d also guess a minority of folks with a BB are traders. It’s really more of a vetted calling card.)
You know _traders_ who came from wealthy backgrounds? That's a completely incongruous outcome in my experience. At least in the markets I'm aware of from my career (commodities and fx) the trading component has effectively always been a middle class activity. Something that the kids of cops and plumbers did if they didn't want to go into the family business.
That has changed in the last 20 years or so but only because those jobs have effectively gone away. They are the factory jobs of the finance world. They succumbed to the automation impulse that started in the 80s and reached its zenith in the early 2010s. Traders basically don't exist anymore, a computer can do the job much more effectively. So much so that I was shocked when I _encountered_ a real live trading desk as part of a recent job move.
I assumed they were referring to market crashes caused by irresponsible levels of risks and deceptive practices like we saw in 2008, and/or government-funded bailouts
Bloomberg Terminal is that equivalent. Like, imagine if RHEL had an integrated live service TUI and integrated chat messenger system for customers, and you’d get about the same result except for a Linux distribution discussing packages and kernel patches and such, right? And since everyone using it is a paying customer, they can be taken for granted as likely being a serious participant rather than a bot/troll.
The terminal is also sort of an app platform for brokers and other firms to sell services to the buy side.
A few examples:
1. As a researcher, you can develop indexes and portfolios, then make those available to customers via bbg
2. Goldman has a service that let's you buy equities via SWAPs, if a fund can't hold said equities for regulatory or operational reasons. The whole service is a series of menus within the terminal.
3. Many brokers offer automatic trading services like "sell this notional but do it very slowly" etc etc... they do that via bbg
It's really only a specific subset of traders that need close to zero latency. Many other finance professionals deal on larger timescales so it's not that big a deal. I am more "finance-adjacent" so I don't use Bloomberg personally but have worked on plenty of deals where "time sensitive" means "it has to get done this week. Oh wait, the bank hasn't finished its KYC checks yet. Okay, it definitely has to get done next week. Unless the KYC checks are still ongoing, in which case, for sure gotta get it done by the end of the month".
Y latency doesn't matter if a human is looking at something. By the time your caveman-speed brain reacts, an FPGA sitting in an Equinix data center has made a hundred trades.
There is a marketplace on Bloomberg where you can buy and sell interesting stuff you don’t really find anywhere else. Some of it stored in freeports and delivered to your freeport, etc. top tier escorts, etc.
Bloomberg Terminal is for humans. It takes about 10 clicks to do a stock BUY. your average retail stock trading platform is much quicker, many have 1 click trading.
The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
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.
Bloomberg is also a channel for other data providers. You can access your gas pipeline flow data and index prices, which you buy from SP Global, via Bloomberg, for example. It brings data sources into one place.
It's a bit ironic that in a country with free markets, so much of the data that is relevant to modern finance is proprietary and quite expensive.
The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.
A stock exchange is nothing more than a marketplace. Anyone can start their own (the challenge being, getting a bunch of companies to want to list their stock with you).
That freedom is actually why it's hard to create a Bloomberg competitor - in order to provide their data stream, Bloomberg has to have partnerships with hundreds of companies worldwide who run exchanges for stocks, bonds and other instruments. If exchanges were government-controlled rather than free-market, there would be more centralization and getting the data together would be easier.
> A stock exchange is nothing more than a marketplace. Anyone can start their own (the challenge being, getting a bunch of companies to want to list their stock with you).
Not really true. I can't just start a stock exchange. I need to comply with a bazillion regulations. Then I need a license, which I won't get.
As much as the crypto space is disliked, it also showed what happens when regulation isn't stopping you. Exchanges would pop up and anyone could create one. You didn't have to be already wealthy, a spin off from a hedge fund, a connected family, a connected person. You could just do it, and if it was good enough, people would trade on your venue.
Then, probably correctly, regulation came, and now that is all gone. The little person can't do that any longer, it is now reserved for the elites again.
Seriously. I see a cool product that someone built and is sharing with the community, and the top comment is basically a criticism that it's not a $31k terminal.
Well yes, but a lot of people immediately jump to conclusions based on name alone, it's human nature. Definitely something to consider when you're picking a name for a project.
An example that comes to mind is JSON5. People have a visceral reaction to the name, it sounds like it's trying to be HTML4.01 -> 5 but for JSON. In reality, it has its uses but doesn't supersede JSON whatsoever. The name itself has given it a bad rap though.
If you pick a name like "Gloomberb" the most obvious interpretation is that it's a Bloomberg alternative.
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.
Bloomberg terminal is only $133/day (assuming 240 work days per year). So, while $32k/yr seems expensive at first glance, given the total annual cost of an analyst or trader, it's not huge. Of course, they'd rather not spend the $32k/yr if they could avoid it, if bloomberg can give you an edge on just one or two trades a year, you come out ahead. So...
I can say companies with less than 20 mil arr pay around $150k a year for saas and others (sometimes the same) also pay 50k a year for a niche agent harness.
Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.
I get that, was more curious if you knew how much that is used for signaling and the traffic there. I sort of expected these communities to exist in other sources (like regular SMS / Slack / private back channels etc).
I'm going to copy-paste one of the comments from ryukoposting higher up in the thread because I think it's relevant here:
> 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"
You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.
Also, and in addition, the value of the Bloomberg Terminal is not the UI, it is the consistency. You don't pay for an accelerator and a break pedal, you pay for the 100% guarantee to find them in the place >100k people have been trained to find them.
> 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.
Are they trading bonds, equities, credit default swaps, options,
, etc in large dollar amounts? “Finance” is pretty broad, Bloomberg is for traders and I-bankers afaict.
Can't you just use a bunch of agents to extract financial statements from company websites the moment they are published? OK, no insider info but you can still do quick agentic fundamental analysis and decide which companies are interesting.
If fundamentals matter for stock performance, sure yeah. I would be interested to see the results of trying that against the kinda alpha wall street uses usually
Some folks do fundamental analysis, some do technical analysis, most do a mix of those. You don't need Bloomberg terminal to extract fundamentals nor alpha. Maybe a better example would be S&P Capital IQ - you can essentially replace it with agents doing the web searches and extractions for you. Another 20-50k saved.
The US publishes financial statements for free on EDGAR. But then you have to parse the unstructured data, normalize it so you can compare a bank to an airline to a manufacturer and then you have to accommodate mergers and acquisitions throughout history and every revision a company makes for prior periods, and then you're starting to talk about real money and the price of Cap IQ or Compustat or Factset starts to look pretty attractive, especially if your alpha doesn't come from your proprietary methods of databasing financial statements.
You're paying for direct lines to these firms. It's a big chat/social media platform. Combined with the data and news and you got yourself a hell of a platform
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.
He created that company I believe. I interviewed at Godel long ago and would probably have received an offer but he was convicted during the interview process and they paused hiring.
As someone whose trading is mostly based on vibes via Reuters, X, and the Apple Stocks app, this is a fun dip in the deep end. The tiling UI is quite sensible once you get the hang of it.
The one thing I can't figure out is how to set a pane to change its ticker symbol based on the selected one in another pane. The default research panes do this, but I can't figure out how to set a new one to do it.
People repeat this rhetoric all the time, but I promise you, finance professionals can and do easily migrate to other messaging platforms such as ICE chat. This isn't a moat for BBG
Evidence for this being that BlackBerry Messenger and even AOL Instant Messenger had various amounts of traction during the lifetime of Instant Bloomberg.
I don't think the finance field needs a better bloomberg, I think the whole interface and everything needs to be rethought. Part of the moat is the data, and data access. But I think we need to completely reimagine the terminal interface and interactions with the introduction of AI. The finance industry probably will be slow to adapt, but I genuinely think someone could completely disrupt 99% of the wall street businesses with an original idea.
My observation is that finance and banking and corporate functions high enough up the ladder operate more like a clubhouse than cutthroat businesses. You’d think all you need to do is make a better interface, but if you’re not part of the club, you’re not doing the business (or even getting shot at it).
Not particularly. I don’t think Bloomberg has any super-proprietary data. It’s more like Excel. There is a command or two that is so weirdly niche specific that some user somewhere really needs. And it has a social network.
Bloomberg, as it is, will probably work as long as humans are in the loop in trading financial assets.
Here's an article. Basically if your trading stocks no. If you are trading different instruments or want interaction with the money folks (connections) yes.
https://financetracked.com/bloomberg-terminal
From it:
"Bonds and Fixed Income: It provides the best data for interest rates and debt markets.
Global Economics: It easily connects data from different countries, such as currency rates and government debt.
The Chat Room: The messaging system is the industry standard. If you want to talk to the biggest players in the market, you often need to be on Bloomberg."
There are alternatives that cost much less than 30k per year for just stocks. They need to prove their value proposition for that more generalized use case.
Bloomberg Terminal costs ~$24K per user per year, so the fact that people are paying for it implies it offers at least that much value. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, most of that value lies in the data sources.
I'm a regular Joe, but finance screens seem like pure wank to me. If you work a desk in NYC, maybe it's a different story, and even then probably not, but if you're some bum nobody from LA with a little bit of money to throw around, there's absolutely nothing these things, or 6 simultaneous screens and an RGB PC case are going to tell you that give you some sort of long-term edge.
Horoscopes for young impressionable men, along with Bitcoin and all sorts of crap, was the most articulate way I've heard it.
As if technical analysis was worth more insight than pissing straight up looking for rain. Sure, it's wet.
Right but it doesn't answer my question about what you don't consider a slop TUI though.
> Slop is slop when the author could not have done it without the AI.
For Vim (1.) and Linux's AI adoption policies, there are some contributors who couldn't have made a PR / patch without AI. Are Vim and Linux now considered slop because they allow AI contributions?
I would say this is a fair question, and that slop can be laundered when there are multiple collaborators and at least one of them knows what they are doing. Whereas a monograph written entirely by Claude is always just slop.
> The download button doesn't even work properly. Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg
I mean, it works for me?
The site is clearly not ready and maybe they didn't expect people to find it, but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
It is just a work in progress.
I'm not even interested in the site anyway the software and the source interests me more.
In actuality, successful open source projects recruit developers by providing value to them. If there's a failure before you even install the product, there's 0 reason for someone to start contributing right away, why not start their own project at that point? Contributing 1 to something that has 0 value is a donation in exchange for nothing, not how Open Source usually works.
When I see new software now, my first thought is an LLM wrote it and it makes me not want to use it. I also assume there are bugs and it’s not particularly feature-rich.
It is becoming very hard not to use an LLM. I have been working on a project all this year. I started doing everything by hand, and I am using LLMs a little bit more every day.
I suppose we want to use projects that were crafted with care, whether or not LLMs were used. But it is not easy to figure that out. It reminds me. 30 years ago, before code formatters were popular, you could tell good code just by looking at how carefully formatted it was.
Related: please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages! Don't make the runtime your user's problem.
My point about interpreted languages stands though. These bundled javascript runtime "apps" eat at least 500M of RAM on boot. That's totally not needed for a CLI tool. If it's not bundled, then it's even worse as you hit the supply chain and tooling interference problems (and you still use the same RAM). There are a lot of good, modern, compiled languages. CLI builders should pick up those stacks imho.
Thank you for giving the world your free software. Feel no compunction to undertake extra work to please people who criticize your work. They are not paying for your software and are not paying your bills. If your install eats enormous amounts of ram or uses a programming language they do not like, that is their problem. In your case for example they are free to get Bloomberg.
If you want to do free work to please critical people, ok. But I wouldn’t bother. Thank you for all the work you did to write your software and then the even more work you did to share it. I write my own software but don’t bother sharing it because it’s a lot of work, so I appreciate you.
Is it? I see some kinda subscription, so there's gotta be some non MIT portion of it
An open source interface to a proprietary backend isn't really fully auditable.
> please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages!
Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
This is how I found out it's a javascript project and didn't install it. I only even bothered to do that because I actually wanted to try it. I'm just saying it would be awesome to have that right there next to the curl command.
> Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
And I prefer not to use those. Everything I said for Javascript holds for Python, Perl, Ruby... as well.
Anyway, most of what I write is designed to be installed in a virtualenv, which restricts the blast radius to one specific application.
Download it, put it wherever you like (probably `~/.local/bin/`) and you're good to use it.
Sometimes I truly wonder...
On the other hand, just because I run `brew install someapp`, it somehow feels safer, but why? That app could be doing anything too.
1. If the connection dies mid transfer, bash will still execute it.
So `rm -rf ~/.local/bin/whatever` can become `rm -rf ~`
The author can avoid this by wrapping everything in a function. But you wouldn’t know if they did so if you aren’t outputting it to a file first.
2. Say the link points to an S3 bucket and it gets compromised, there’s no record of the payload to analyze.
I’m sure there’s a plethora of other subtleties, but I’ve always had the same question as you and thought I’d share.
[0] https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables
TS/JS is not the problem.
You can, and you should eject your dependencies and package them with your releases. And I don't understand why it's not a common practice.
You can even bundle your releases with a runtime, but that's not always the best solution. For something like this I'd actually prefer interpreted code I can inspect line by line rather than having a blob of unknown origin.
I don't know where that came from but it should definitely disappear.
At least the developer includes the binaries for all platforms in the GitHub release page.
It's not crazy to prefer a package manager package to a curl|bash YOLO. OP is stating that preference, which various people have agreed with. If you posted "I love curl|bash install method - please do more of this" that is also fine. Either way it's a signal for both the author and anyone considering shipping this type of software, that their audience may have a certain preference.
I would want to know that about any project before I try and evaluate it personally.
... unless, of course, it's Perl. Right?
Everybody who's distracted by the name and can't get past it, there's a thread developing here somewhere, where they're comparing it to Bloomberg.
Edit: Ah, they're offering a pro subscription. While I appreciate that cloud services aren't free, I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay to replace a few browser tabs. Not for me, but maybe for someone!
explain where you got the data from
else this will just be bit of Bloomberg meme
I am not making this up.
There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.
Anyone else old enough to remember scripting a tradebot in Asheron's Call?
You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description.
But exactly zero of the people I know who were raised in either poverty or mediocrity are traders or involved in finance, aside from maybe accounting.
Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children.
Perhaps things were a bit different decades ago, in the scrappy past, but it feels like most higher earning spheres are closing in around pre-existing wealth.
I was. Algorithmic derivatives. The rich kids went into banking. Their connections bought deal flow. Those of us from public universities mostly went into trading. It’s why it’s been looked down on within Wall Street since basically ever.
> I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children
Parents buying their kids Bloomberg terminals aren’t looking for them to get into trading, they’re training them to start a hedge fund.
(I’d also guess a minority of folks with a BB are traders. It’s really more of a vetted calling card.)
That has changed in the last 20 years or so but only because those jobs have effectively gone away. They are the factory jobs of the finance world. They succumbed to the automation impulse that started in the 80s and reached its zenith in the early 2010s. Traders basically don't exist anymore, a computer can do the job much more effectively. So much so that I was shocked when I _encountered_ a real live trading desk as part of a recent job move.
Trading can bring down a bank (e.g.Barings) but is not a big systemic risk.
What's the equivalent of hacker news for financial folk?
A few examples:
1. As a researcher, you can develop indexes and portfolios, then make those available to customers via bbg
2. Goldman has a service that let's you buy equities via SWAPs, if a fund can't hold said equities for regulatory or operational reasons. The whole service is a series of menus within the terminal.
3. Many brokers offer automatic trading services like "sell this notional but do it very slowly" etc etc... they do that via bbg
The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
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.
The exchange/marketplace is the oldest business in the world. How absurd that in 2026 seats on exchanges cost millions and the entities that control exchanges are mechanisms of gatekeeping rather than quality control -- the cronyism shown to SpaceX reveals just how corrupt it's become.
That freedom is actually why it's hard to create a Bloomberg competitor - in order to provide their data stream, Bloomberg has to have partnerships with hundreds of companies worldwide who run exchanges for stocks, bonds and other instruments. If exchanges were government-controlled rather than free-market, there would be more centralization and getting the data together would be easier.
Not really true. I can't just start a stock exchange. I need to comply with a bazillion regulations. Then I need a license, which I won't get.
As much as the crypto space is disliked, it also showed what happens when regulation isn't stopping you. Exchanges would pop up and anyone could create one. You didn't have to be already wealthy, a spin off from a hedge fund, a connected family, a connected person. You could just do it, and if it was good enough, people would trade on your venue.
Then, probably correctly, regulation came, and now that is all gone. The little person can't do that any longer, it is now reserved for the elites again.
Financial information should be free for everyone.
An example that comes to mind is JSON5. People have a visceral reaction to the name, it sounds like it's trying to be HTML4.01 -> 5 but for JSON. In reality, it has its uses but doesn't supersede JSON whatsoever. The name itself has given it a bad rap though.
If you pick a name like "Gloomberb" the most obvious interpretation is that it's a Bloomberg alternative.
Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
> 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"
You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.
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.
(I’d especially love to see some federated social feature built in!)
There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.
The one thing I can't figure out is how to set a pane to change its ticker symbol based on the selected one in another pane. The default research panes do this, but I can't figure out how to set a new one to do it.
You pretty much need $30/m subscriptions for historical data. Not that it couldn't be worked into this.
Not particularly. I don’t think Bloomberg has any super-proprietary data. It’s more like Excel. There is a command or two that is so weirdly niche specific that some user somewhere really needs. And it has a social network.
Bloomberg, as it is, will probably work as long as humans are in the loop in trading financial assets.
From it: "Bonds and Fixed Income: It provides the best data for interest rates and debt markets. Global Economics: It easily connects data from different countries, such as currency rates and government debt. The Chat Room: The messaging system is the industry standard. If you want to talk to the biggest players in the market, you often need to be on Bloomberg."
My dismissal is their problem to solve.
Horoscopes for young impressionable men, along with Bitcoin and all sorts of crap, was the most articulate way I've heard it.
As if technical analysis was worth more insight than pissing straight up looking for rain. Sure, it's wet.
Because I'm starting to see the word 'slop' as a synonym for:
"This person may or may not have used AI to build software and I don't like it"
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#:~:text=%E2%80...
> Slop is slop when the author could not have done it without the AI.
For Vim (1.) and Linux's AI adoption policies, there are some contributors who couldn't have made a PR / patch without AI. Are Vim and Linux now considered slop because they allow AI contributions?
(1.) https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#using...
https://imgur.com/a/ssiKckF
Hopefully it's not intentional
Your website is literally down.
https://i.postimg.cc/YCdkwZZq/image.png
And I don't think their website is that bad.
The download button doesn't even work properly.
Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg
Docs give me a 404, blog is empty
I mean, it works for me?
The site is clearly not ready and maybe they didn't expect people to find it, but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
It is just a work in progress.
I'm not even interested in the site anyway the software and the source interests me more.
https://github.com/gloom-sh/gloomberb
Doesn't invalidate my experience.
> and maybe they didn't expect people to find it
What do you mean? It's linked on the Github repo.
> but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
I think a site that doesn't work properly is a bad one. That's just my opinion.
I mean isn't this the point of open source?
You can fork the repo and fix the problem instead of complaining?
You can fix it though or open an issue.
>I mean isn't this the point of open source?
Only if you just found what open source is.
In actuality, successful open source projects recruit developers by providing value to them. If there's a failure before you even install the product, there's 0 reason for someone to start contributing right away, why not start their own project at that point? Contributing 1 to something that has 0 value is a donation in exchange for nothing, not how Open Source usually works.
Yes.
You know the project is OSS, you found the problem, you can fix it or open and issue instead of complaining to me about it.
Problem solved.
That benefits everyone rather than forking a project and starting all over again and wasting effort.
I cannot reproduce the problem, so I can't fix it.
But since you're complaining about it and you have the right skills, you can!
If you fail at a webpage in 2026, you have no chance at doing anything complex or innovative.