Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky—Everyone Still Uses It · Issue #87 · OZ Talking

Opening

Hello, subscriber. This is Oz’s Knowledge Talking. A tweet on X (formerly Twitter) recently sent a shock through the trading floors. The poster was none other than Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Iran’s parliament. The tweet itself was a short, mocking comparison of the oil market to the bond market — but the real story was in the last line.

“EUCRBRDT Index GP ”

At first glance it reads like an indecipherable code, but it’s actually a Bloomberg Terminal command. The implication was that a senior official from a sanctioned country was casually operating inside the very heart of Western financial infrastructure. The existing suspicion that Iran was quietly raking in huge sums from oil trading suddenly felt a lot closer to confirmed.

But I want to look at this from a different angle. Just what is the Bloomberg Terminal, that one line of command could set off this much noise? Why was Iran’s parliament speaker using it in the first place? And why, 44 years on, can the financial industry still not let go of this “clunky, expensive” machine?

Today, let’s follow these questions.

Get analysis like this in your inbox. Subscribe free<br>🛢️ What That One Line Actually Means

Let’s break the command down piece by piece.

EUCRBRDT is the ticker1 for the Bloomberg European Dated Brent Forties Oseberg Ekofisk (BFOE) Crude Oil Spot Price. The name is a mouthful, but in plain terms, it’s the spot2 price index for North Sea Brent crude3. It’s registered as an official time series on the European Central Bank (ECB)‘s data portal — a core benchmark of the global oil market.

Index marks this ticker as, well, an index rather than a stock or a bond — a market qualifier4. On a Bloomberg keyboard, this is exactly what the yellow keys (GOVT, CORP, EQUITY, INDEX, and so on) are for.

GP stands for Graph Price — the command to pull up a price chart for that ticker.

And the final is the Bloomberg keyboard’s famous green GO key — the “execute” button that plays the role of an Enter key. Interestingly, that shade of green is borrowed from the “GO” square on a Monopoly board, in the hope that every time a user hits the key, they collect some winnings.

Put together, the line reads:

“Pull up the spot price chart for Brent crude.”

Here’s the problem: this isn’t a command just anyone can casually try. The Bloomberg Terminal is a closed system that costs upward of $30,000 a year to access. And the fact that a senior Iranian official — sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)5 — appeared to be fluent enough in this command syntax to slip it into a tweet reads, all too neatly, as circumstantial evidence of sanctions evasion or oil-trading activity.

Of course, other explanations remain on the table — a staffer tweeting on his behalf, someone on his team drafting it, and so on. But the suspicion itself has already outgrown the realm of mere suspicion.

And this is where the real story begins. What exactly is this Bloomberg Terminal, with its cryptic command language?

💻 The Machine Once Called “Bl-daeri” — What Is the Bloomberg Terminal, Really

The Bloomberg Terminal is a financial information workstation used daily by roughly 350,000 finance professionals worldwide. It’s an all-in-one platform that handles real-time market data, news, analytics, messaging, and order execution — all on a single screen.

The story goes back to 1981. Michael Bloomberg, then a partner at Salomon Brothers, was let go after the firm was acquired by Phibro Corporation. He got no severance, but he walked away with roughly $10 million from his equity stake. With that money he founded a company called Innovative Market Systems (IMS). In December of the following year, the first terminal — “Market Master” — was installed at Merrill Lynch’s offices. That was the beginning of the Bloomberg Terminal.

At the time, bond traders needed anywhere from several minutes to tens of minutes, armed with paper and a calculator, just to plot a single yield curve 6. Bloomberg’s terminal processed the same task in real time with a few keystrokes. By 1991, roughly 10,000 terminals were already installed worldwide, and in 1990 the launch of Bloomberg News cemented the machine as an integrated platform combining “data + news + analysis” on one screen.

Today, Bloomberg L.P. is valued at roughly $150 billion (as of 2025), with more than 85% of total revenue coming from terminal subscriptions. Michael Bloomberg himself has become one of the world’s richest people, with a Forbes-estimated net worth of about $106 billion (April 2024) — an empire built on a single machine.

Why Koreans Called It “Bl-daeri”

In Korea’s financial industry, there’s long been a habit of calling the Bloomberg Terminal “Bl-daeri” — literally “Bloomberg assistant manager” — because the terminal’s annual subscription fee was roughly equivalent to the annual salary of an assistant...