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Ah, I see and didn't pick up on the tongue-in-cheekness!

The network effect is real and I don't think you can interface external email with it. You do get a Bloomberg email address as a user but I've never seen anyone in a chat with an external email only.

Thank you, very cool!

Where can I find it in the terminal? Sounds like a fun thing to play with...

That's the default. You can get real-time feeds for pretty much anything if you pay extra for it. That also really adds up BTW so only our traders tend to be permissioned for real time data.

That's called vertical integration, not an anti-trust violation.

It could be if they were the only one trying to offer this, but because it's so expensive, there are always multiple competitors trying to pick off their users. And when the next round of corporate cost cutting comes, they always come for the Bloomberg terminals, trying to push something cheaper.

But the cheaper alternatives are always inferior too (never mind the decades of muscle memory on Bloomberg).

Despite the price Bloomberg has maintained its number one position. I think in no small part that's also because their customer support is absolutely excellent. Press F1 twice and you're in a chat with the helpdesk; these days the initial query is triaged by AI of course, but for actual issues you're talking to a real human in less than a minute (sometimes just seconds), and these real actual humans typically have the expertise to help you. If not, the higher levels of support are good too. Don't underestimate this aspect!

It's all that and much more. It has an enormous amount of data of all kinds that could be vaguely relevant in finance. BMAP can show you vessels (AIS data), location of LNG terminals, powerplants, bank branches, crop yield forecasts (just a few I picked off the list just now) and so much more on an interactive world map.

And every kind of price you can think of (almost). Crack spreads? River levels? Baseload power? Airline schedules? I am trying to think of more but it's truly VAST.

They have custom screens, configurable screens, custom settings (you want the generic futures contract to be rolled differently from the default? Sure...), option pricers and stuff I have never had to search for or look at.

They also have their own query language BQL for data queries and the BQNT platform is Python-based and optimized for use with the data.

If you just want the latest stock prices for your portfolio your online brokerage app probably does a better job.

The biggest miss right now is their ASKB AI chatbot, which is borderline moronic. It has to be some older model with low thinking/effort, because the first answer it gives is always broken in some way. Hallucinated functions or fields, outright wrong descriptions, etc. I don't even try to use the first answer anymore but ask it again to check its previous answer against verified and authoritative sources/documentation and will come up with many corrections. And then I do it again, and maybe a fourth time.

IIRC Melbourne had the longest lockdown in the world.

On Windows I use PowerToys' Alt+Space command bar which does a much better job. In fact, it's the only search I use on Windows.