Data aggregation is how the Terminal built its user-base, but messaging is what actually keeps people there. Bloomberg Chat is where most large trades get negotiated -- so if you don't have a login, you don't really have an identity as a trader. Makes it hard to switch.

It's a terrific example of network effect as moat. Several years ago, six of the largest banks got together to fund Symphony as a Bloomberg-killing chat tool [1]. More than $100M invested later, it's still only successfully competing with Bloomberg for internal chat at financial firms [2]. Inter-company chats are still happening mainly on full price terminals that costs 100x what Symphony costs for a seat.

[1] https://symphony.com/press/releases/consortium-leading-finan... [2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

Usually when I hear people talk about alternatives to Bloomberg, my first though is that that they have no idea how many things Bloomberg actually covers. Sooo many products, so much data, you wouldn't even believe the scale. And yeah, as others have mentioned, massive network effect, essentially everyone in the capital markets. Sure, you might find an alternative for some very narrow specific thing that it does for a lot less money. (Worked there for many years, foreign exchange and bond trading stuff.)

Google Finance is a laughable comparison to Bloomberg. Bloomberg is basically a self contained world. When I last dealt with it in the early 2000s, it had an internal messaging system, real time feeds for news from all over the world, and ability to trade and query on all sorts of markets around the globe. IIRC, your Bloomberg messaging handle is yours basically for life so no matter which company you work for you can still be reachable. It also integrates well with Excel and provides a huge amount of complex financial calculation functions (which I suppose Google or some other alternative might be able to do too, assuming they can hire the people who has the expertise). Oh and around the clock support. The only alternative that's even remotely close to that is Reuter's service. You can see why that's the only alternative -- very few organizations have the means to tap into all these data sources from around the world in basically real time.

You need to use a Bloomberg terminal and observe its users use them to really get an idea of what it provides before you can make a reasonable suggestion for an alternative.

Sadly no. The only viable (and closed) alternative to Bloomberg Terminal is Eikon from Thomson Reuters [1].

However, I find Routers finance news & details much more accessible than those from Bloomberg as they offer a bunch of rss feeds, depending on category you'd like to track.

[1] https://eikon.thomsonreuters.com/index.html [2] https://www.reuters.com/tools/rss

It’s not the terminal, it’s the people that feed information and research. The terminal is just access to that information.

There are barely any true proprietary alternatives, let alone open ones.

I worked there in a past life, still miss having access to the terminal. Ive always wished they launched a consumer version for <100 USD a month.

Check out www.tiingo.com. I use it for my casual needs.

Try KloudTrader. We are currently building one.

https://KloudTrader.com