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> What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free.

While that's true for stocks and key rates, Bloomberg is all about bonds, and there is really no competition there. And it's not only the market data that's important. Bloomberg provides reference and indicative data on hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fixed income instruments.

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The same could be said for all their FICC offerings. Their equity analysis is also better than other platforms I've used. On top of that, their data on vanilla and exotic derivatives are OK but we had some issues with consistency between broker / market marks and Bloomberg marks for implied volatility on some of the most liquid contracts out there.

Yep, and those bond (and swap) prices are not public prices in the same way as equity prices from exchanges. They're indicative dealer quotes. ALLQ shows a stack of dealer quotes. No other system does this...

Eh, you're a bit off. You can find compiled quotes in lots of places, and individual quotes from any broker or dealer, so there are other systems that do this (maybe none that have exactly ALLQs same dealers giving quotes). But you're right saying that many times these prices are indicative quotes from dealers.

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