I had the same question. It looks to me that you have to add API keys for data sources.
Although a lot of work no doubt has gone into this, it seems to me like a bit of a pointless project if someone then must source their own data from various (and varying in quality and price) APIs. As mentioned, the entire value of Bloomberg is the data. Its not an interface which almost anyone can create.
In any case, you are right. We rely on API keys because unlike BBT we don't own the data, and therefore, we are essentially a platform that aggregates investment research data - and that the user is allowed to customize their own feeds.
in reality, as someone who worked at TR on Eikon and then moved to Bloomberg (law, wasn't competing directly with my former colleagues), Bloomberg's main value that is difficult to displace is IB.
For equities that is true and most Bloomberg functionality can be replicated with Sat Interactive Brokers plus some data subscriptions. Doing fixed income manually without the data pre populated in Bloomberg is very painful. But yes, the chat is where the franchise is and recent SEC actions punishing any non compliant communications like texts or alternative messaging services with massive fines have only given that moat another decade at least of invulnerability.
Maybe in theory. The message I get from almost everyone at a regulated institution is Bloomberg, e-mail, or voice. When the SEC is on a warpath, compliance and legal departments don’t play with anything but the clearest black and white lines to optimize for the convenience of staff. It is frustrating because it imposes a monopoly tax on financial market participants to get a Bloomberg or be shut out of information flow which is death in markets. I’ve yet to find anyone I deal with who says hey find me on Symphony.
Bloomberg provides you normalized data across all asset classes, cross asset portfolio analytics and management tools. First party trading venues, access to the world's largest broker network, immediate access to news including news sentiment indicators across the terminal offering. Access to it's own brokerage (trade book is still a thing I think), buyside and sell side Order Management platforms, APIs to feed the same stuff into your excel and servers.
Did I mention all this tooling is engineered to be compliant across regulatory regimes.
So yes chat is important and having a BB terminal definitely separates the men from the boys but that's additional to the indispensable functionality the platform itself provides.
