Bottom line, It's theft of services and when you get caught, I can assure you it will a lot more than the cost of an annual Bloomberg license fee! Big Mike has the best attorney's money can buy, do you?
I think Bloomberg is a great serice and fully worth the $1,800 a month. But if you reckon the fx or futures prices dont move until the figures are called on Bloomberg TV you live in dreamworld.
Is this still available? I am interested in Bloomberg data too, and would like to lower the costs. Please PM me.
OP you are living in a dream world if you think you can pull this off. You need a Bloomberg terminal and then you can only share one screen. A lot of prop firms have a single terminal and they offer (local and remote) traders the ability to VNC into their office Bloomberg. Its a royal PITA to have guys constantly changing the screens, not be able to pull data or spreadsheets because its a SHARED terminal, etc. Also Bloomberg connects via private IP or over internet - and if you get a point to point that's ~$450/month and Bloomberg provides the connectivity. Connecting to Bloomberg over internet isn't nearly as fast as if you have a point to point with them. You can not co-locate with Bloomberg. If you are a BIG customer you MAY be able to cross connect Bloomberg Server API in the same facility as their data servers but that's not something you could do. Bloomberg knows if you are using a remote desktop session and/or running Windows Server OS vs. a standard desktop OS (like XP or W7). Your best bet would be to run Windows 7 Professional and do the multi-RDP hack. This would give each user an RDP session and access to shared API (for excel dde, etc.). You wouldn't be able to see the screen (well maybe one user would) but you would be able to access the API. You could use VNC's v4.6 Enterprise and view into a remote desktop session which would give you the ability to use TWO screens - one for VNC to see the terminal and one to RDP into the API - but be warned that if you are going to do this you need a $10k box to run this on. The Bloomberg guys are pretty smart - they will catch you and you can't really put a non-server terminal in a datacenter unless you know your rep.
As far as instant news is concerned I'm not sure one needs a BLG terminal for that. There are other news services that will give you that(I believe Reuters has something like that costing less than $1K a month) There is also newsstrike, which is basically a dude with a mic broadcasting audio on what he is reading off his terminal/other news sources(Its free)
Bloomberg is faster than Reuters (at least it is here in NYC). Bloomberg over a private IP (point to point) is very very fast, but even still, BLP over Internet is quicker than Reuters or Thomson One over internet. For energy or econ numbers you can often go to the source and ping the websites that release the data. The only problem with that is they limit the number of page refreshes and pings so its a crap-shoot. Sharing a Bloomberg among a group of guys is not the best idea - besides the license issues you don't really ever get the full experience, can't use the IM features, chats, etc. At that point its almost a waste. If you can't afford the terminal you probably wouldn't benefit from it.