There are some resources posted at business schools, where Bloomberg Terminal usage is frequently part of coursework [1, 2, 3]. Also the "Bloomberg Markets" magazine (frequently sold in major airports) covers new terminal features and shows how to use the terminal to analyze trending financial topics.
I recommend going to your local business public library, they usually have a terminal. Or your local university MBA library. Just play around with it. It is a beautiful and very different machine/software.
If you really want to use it, I enjoyed the book Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance which uses the Bloomberg Terminal quite a bit for interactive learning.
Not sure about your city, but for example, while I was in college, I accessed the Bloomberg terminal from:
https://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl
while off-campus
Similarly, law libraries usually have access to LexisNexis or Westlaw. It’s as useless for uninitiated as access to Bloomberg Terminal - you need to be trained to do anything useful with them.
Here's a pretty good tutorial [1] (albeit a bit old) on how to price credit default swaps using a typical Bloomberg function. This kind of esoteric fixed income calculator is what makes Bloomberg so dominant. Otherwise, you'd have to write all of this crap in Excel just to price a relatively simple product like a swap.
Best way to see what the terminal looks like to look up help and documentation for it. Google things like "Bloomberg SWPM tutorial"
A fair bit can be pieced together from its own website.
For example these days the terminal is just a software based product which comes with a keyboard for each license. The PC is up to you to provide. You can even connect to Bloomberg using the internet but you can still use a dedicated leased line connection.
In the past few years, Bloomberg has been sponsoring a booth at PyCon US (they're always hiring). They have a 3 screen terminal setup there where you can see it in action and ask questions about how it works. They will be there again at PyCon in April in Pittsburgh.
If all the institutions are inputting trades on their Bloomberg terminals, does that mean Bloomberg is actually executing their trades, making margin loans, etc? Or is just just a standardized interface to other firms?
What about when traders IM each other? How does that actually become a trade? Does someone at the bank read their chat history looking for agreements to buy/sell and do the actual paperwork later?
> does that mean Bloomberg is actually executing their trades, making margin loans, etc? Or is just just a standardized interface to other firms?
good question! often its a standardized interface to other firms, a "middle office" that is usually at your broker (if you're a fledgling shop) or in your own offices (if you're a bank or a bigger more established fund). yes, this means you use bloomberg as a standardized interface to your own firm. This still makes sense because its such an industry standard, and has good compliance recordkeeping. I'm sure Bloomberg could execute your trades, I've just personally never come across or met anyone that has needed that so I'd probably say that is a minority of situations. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why Bloomberg doesn't also own this market. its very standard, boring stuff.
making margin is a whole nother ball game. that's more of broker-dealer territory. again Bloomberg is so big probably some part of it does that kind of thing, but far more common you're getting that sort of thing from a broker-dealer.
> What about when traders IM each other? How does that actually become a trade? Does someone at the bank read their chat history looking for agreements to buy/sell and do the actual paperwork later?
often, yes actually. someone in the middle office looks thru your chat transcript to confirm the trades (sending paperwork over to their counterparts, making sure it's within appropriate limits and placed in the right risk accounts etc). for more standard deals you might have a STP (straight through processing system) automatically pick it up from chat (with ofc a confirmation step). i have no idea when this started, it was before my time, but this definitely predates bloomberg itself. As a currency trader at a bank we had these old ass machines (i forget their name, oops, i loved them) where you had a direct line to all other banks and could "call out" to them to deal over chat. because of the sensitive nature of these transactions (you could be dealing in billions of notional amounts), one unique nature of these chats was that they were immutable: no backspace, no edit button. this means we needed a convention to recover from typos. this often worked out as spamming EEEEE after a mistake, e.g. "Hi I buy 200 EUR at 45EEEEEE43 pls thx". Sometimes flagrant mistakes aren't caught either, so there's a sort of gentleman's agreement thing if you spot your counterpart making a mistake in your favor, you ask them if they're sure or to double check, and if they're sure then you take the deal.
kinda rickety, but it worked. this is how much of institutional block trading is still done today* , but ofc more and more is taken over by bots.
*caveat that i'm about 4 years out of the business now
only very occasionally, specifically because other people use them as support and resistance levels. that sht is real.
but otherwise.. yeah most of the time technical analysis is extreme backfit tea leaf reading mixed up with poor understanding of value vs momentum factors.
burned out, it was super high stress. multiple nights sleeping at my desk. waking up with cold sweats having nightmares about my positions. say a "good" trader gets 52% of their trades correct. that means you're wrong 48% of the time, even on the stuff you're high conviction, done a genuine amount of work on. (tbf not all shops do this, i was just in a large multimanager hedge fund that did work like that. ofc if you're at a quant shop this does not at all apply).
as a junior-to-mid level person in finance, most of us are doing some form of coding anyway. i was forced to progress from vba to python to haskell based on the shops i was at. i realized that i was both good at this, enjoyed it, and didnt enjoy the trading part. so i decided to switch into dev despite having no qualifications for it. doing a js bootcamp helped fill in the holes.
i'd say finance careers have a much higher ceiling for comp, my boss was pulling in 2m/yr at age 33ish, but he was both lucky and exceptional. i wasn't gonna be him. at my career trajectory (the vast majority of us in finance) i'd probably be more like 200-500k/yr. just kinda not worth it if i could go to tech and make somewhat less but with far better quality of life.
