[osullivj]

Story 1 sounds totally nuts, but Story 2 is a common setup in my experience. Using Bloomberg prices on the desktop is a lot cheaper than BPipe - the server side solution for BBG market data. And quoting indicative prices on BBG from Excel is common too. An interesting new startup that I follow - pricingmonkey.com - is doing BBG driven IRD pricing in the browser with an IR pricing library written totally in JS. There are more details on my blog at etrading.wordpress.com

[MrMattWright]

Yep, that was pretty much it. Price wars over BPipe vs Retuers. "You mean I have to pay twice? Once for my desktop and once for this BPipe thing, and that costs whhhhhaaat? How much?" Also it's not quite as terrifying as firm live pricing, it's only indicative with a good Bid/Offer spread. Enjoyed your blog....I like the Pricing Monkey idea. Would they be picking up the prices from the local machine though? Because surely any other way would mean the same large fees?

[osullivj]

Thanks for the kind words on the blog. Yes - PricingMonkey gets the prices via the BBG API. The dev told me he'd coded it in Python.