Bloomberg is more than a terminal
For those of us who have been in the Financial Services industry for a while, Bloomberg always meant the terminal, but over the last 10 years Bloomberg has been increasing the set of data feeds they offer, until we are left with a (sometimes bewilidering) set of feeds each with its own unique characteristics. During this time, I’ve worked with all of them…. written feed handlers for them and helped clients write applications that consume data from the feed handlers. This is a quick tour.
Normally one might expect with a market data feed, that you request a security and you get all the data. Bloomberg is rather different in this respect because of the huge quantity of reference data available, which must be requested separately. I make a deliberate distinction between static data (price data whose values may change during the day but not broadcast, e.g. FWD_RT_1MO) and reference data (e.g. ID_ISIN, INDUSTRY_SECTOR even though they are requested and delivered in the same way. Also Bloomberg provide some calculation facilities through their "override fields" .
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