This is both true and false. Out of the box, the Bloomberg terminal comes with data required to make it functional for most professional purposes. If I had my terminal, I can load up a random Taiwanese (or any market) stock right now and see the price, tape history, etc. with no prior setup.
However, if I was a Taiwanese trader or market maker, I'd likely pay Taiwanese exchange fees to get access to richer, real-time data (specifically, non-delayed quotes and more market depth.)
I can get this access in under 5 seconds by opting into the desired exchange privileges under EXC<GO> or most likely just pinging my Bloomberg rep. If I remember correctly, I have to log out and back in for the new permissions to permeate my terminal. The cool thing is that all functions automatically leverage the highest level of subscribed data.
Whether I need to jump through more procurement hoops than that depends on where I work. If I am in a small hedge fund, I can just "do this" and if I am in a big firm, we likely already have this data subscribed for.
One of the many reasons Bloomberg exists and continues to be immensely valuable is that it prevents you from having to mess around with individual exchange permissions and data in a one-off way. And don't get me started on normalizing data across exchanges - the fact that Bloomberg does that for you is worth the price alone.
Source: Former Bloomberg employee, former Bloomberg market data client.
To add further color, it works this way because exchanges insist on it. Market data is one of exchanges' key revenue sources and they require their vendors (like Bloomberg) to police it tightly.
When someone subscribes to elevated levels of market data, Bloomberg passes 100% of that money to the exchange. It is a major convenience factor that Bloomberg abstracts all your market data usage for you.
On the flip side, if you use data in your own systems, you basically sign up for a world of pain in terms of exchange fees and pricing compliance. A small example: exchanges may change you per consumer application. So if you have two trading systems, you lay double. But this gets thrny in distributed applications - you may have multiple data connections but it's really just shards of systems parallelized for performance. As a consumer, you face the choice of overpaying for exchange data or risking having to prove that your systems are technical compliant by design depiute the seemingly extra consumer connections. This is a nightmare, which is why firms try to do everything they can on Bloomberg if possible to avoid stepping into this space.
> I can get this access in under 5 seconds by opting into the desired exchange privileges under EXC<GO> or most likely just pinging my Bloomberg rep
Because there is a marketplace. If Gamestonk is successful, there will be a marketplace for low latency feed + commercial support to configure them for you.
Oh interesting, I've not got a Bloomberg but kinda assumed for the price that it was as turn key as they come, ie: majority of the value is in the APIs they grant access to. If you have to pay on top for various APIs what's the point?
Currently the terminal requests API keys that only give access to free tier features. This is so that we can say that every user has access to the exact same features, regardless of whether they have a subscription to a specific API.
This is likely going to continue for a while. However, at some point, we may want to add premium features associated with these APIs. Because if the user is paying such subscription, it makes sense to provide that data on the terminal. Since this will only benefit a small subset of our users, we are deeming this as low priority
True. What most users do is that they work with the terminal as it comes, and as soon as they start needing an API key they go and get it. E.g. I don't trade forex, for me it doesn't make sense to set an Oanda account to get access to this information.
It's hard to improve in this space because we want to keep the terminal free. And exploiting each of the free tiers of these APIs makes that possible at the moment.
Our GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTerminal2 has a Proof of concept GUI, where it works with a one click start. Although API keys still need to be provided.
Do you see any opportunity for consolidation in this space?
I'd love a one click start Bloomberg. I'd also be interested how this might effect the wider market once everyone has the same information