My Dad's Use of the Bloomberg

For the last thirty years my dad has worked as a government bond broker. This involves putting together institutional buyers and sellers of government bond trades. In the beginning this was done simply by using computers, but in the past eight year his job has become more efficient due to the introduction of the Bloomberg system. The Bloomberg analyzes different trades, shows different bids and offers and works out financing and costs of trades.

Before the Bloomberg bond brokers were required to do more research, do the math themselves and use many different sources in order to gather enough information to make a profit. The Bloomberg has helped to eliminate this in order to make the bond brokering process efficient and quicker. The Bloomberg also effectively follows all of a broker’s trades, rather than requiring someone to sit next with the broker and track his work throughout the day.  Thus, the Bloomberg has been regarded as a threat to some. It has taken away the job of those who would track trades and there is fear that it will eventually lead the elimination of bond brokers, but so far this has not occurred.

People still trust having a real broker to communicate and discuss trades rather than relying on a machine to do the work for them. The Bloomberg has helped to make my dad’s work more productive by cutting down busy work of figuring out math or patterns, allowing him to now be able to spend more time communicating with individual clients. This has allowed him to have a more enjoyable job by giving him more time to communicate with others and work on building strong relationships with his clients.

Due to my dad’s difficulty being able to use computers, he has found the Bloomberg fairly difficult to master. Although he is able to use it to his advantage, he feels that there are still many more features available that he is not sure how to use and believes that if he had grown up with more use of computers he would be able to more easily grasp the concepts needed to fully use the system. He has already noticed that many younger workers are able to more easily learn the functions and use it more to their advantage. Overall, although the Bloomberg has dramatically changed the way he works in the last eight years, the introduction of the technology has been looked upon in a positive light, thus leading to an improvement in efficiency and accuracy in the workplace.