Call them and ask for a free trial. They offer a 2week trial or maybe even a 45d, not sure its been a while. Try before you buy. USA: East Coast: 212-318-2000 West Coast: 415-912-2960 Since you won't have a keyboard for your Free Trial, if you press the Alt key plus the L key (Alt+L) you'll get a screen with a keyboard layout displaying the special characters on the BB keyboard. In my opinion its worth every penny of it but you don't really realize the value until you have a terminal and then have to live without.
I had requested a free trial last week. It's now a 30 day trial. From what I was told, the special bloomberg keyboards are a thing of the past.
I'm also looking at Bloomberg as an equity intraday trader, getting tired of relying on tradethenews botching the headlines and want to get it right from the source. So I'm looking at bbg mostly from a news standpoint, but my friend told me a bbg rep went to his firm and said something to the effect that tradethenews was a "major competitor" when it came to trading off headlines, I had pretty much assumed bbg was light years ahead of secondary parasite providers? How does bbg compare to Reuters when it comes to breaking headlines?
Not sure what you mean about keyboards being a thing of the past. I have the new one and its great. They are only part of an account - you don't get a keyboard unless you have a terminal. You don't need a keyboard to use bloomberg, though it makes life a lot easier. Thomson/Reuters and Bloomberg are very comperable when you stack up equal features. The BB comes with only one "package" either you have a terminal or you don't... Reuters starts off at a much lower price point however they are very close when you add on all the comperable features to BB. In terms of data and delivery speeds - depends... they are all pretty quick. I don't know that one has an edge over the other when you are over Internet - if you have a FIX or point to point connection with either then that's a different story.
If someone wanted to trade news which if any would you say offers the news first and / or more complete? My understand is that Thomson Reuters is a lot lower price?? Thanks robert ps i hope you and yours had a very merry christmas
Hey Bob! You as well! Glad to see you got that air hockey table sorted out at 4:30am for the kids! Bloomberg will take news (economic releases, events, earnings, general news, etc.) and both post them on their terminal - which I assume they try to do ASAP, and they will process the data and make it available to customers via their API. Thomson/Reuters is cheaper but does not offer the API part. If you are a purely manual trader I would suggest trying Thomson/Reuters first. They offer no API, no support on an API and they charge bi-monthly (or maybe monthly iirc) no contract vs. bloomberg charges quarterly up front, with a two year contract. The other nice thing about Bloomberg is the network of people and the extras - but if you don't care about that then try a free trial at Thomson and see how it goes.
T/R has offered realtime & historical machine-readable newsfeed data for several years -- but OP might not like the cost. Background: http://online.thomsonreuters.com/newsscopereports/update/reuters_final2.pdf http://www2.reuters.com/productinfo/newsscopearchive/
Think that's probably true in equity land. In fixed income land, bloomberg is the industry standard for everything from calculations to ticket writing. Not to mention EVERYONE in fixed income land is on bloomberg, so the internal messaging system works pretty well.
Agree 100% As for the keyboard questions... The smaller one is the most current version they give out.