Break Out

I caught a few moments of Tom Keene at the Milken Conference yesterday, on Bloomberg TV. I am ever-more amused by the ads run for the concentrated demographic of those who voluntarily watch real-time financial television, and have written about my indignation at the increasingly high-tech ones run by the FX Bucket Shops, a view sympathetically shared by my friends at FT-Alphaville.

Almost as amusing, though slightly less macabre than the coming retail FX train wreck, was Bloomberg's ad touting its own "Launch Pad" kit, a part of its professional service. As a user of Bloomberg since its inception, I have mostly respect for the system and what its management team have built - obliterating all competitors en-route.  Of course, Bloomberg has its flaws which are significant (and which I won't go into here), but the pitch was that you Launch Pad allows you to customize YOUR view of the market, and tailor their data to YOUR desires, in order for YOU to stay informed, so that when the market BREAKS OUT!!!! (yay! whooopeeee!!), you can spot it and TAKE ADVANTAGE of the MOVE. (end of the flashy bits and accompanying thumping escalating rhythmic dramatic music). Whew, now that our blood pressures are south of the near-month price of Cotton, perhaps we might examine what is wrong with this picture.

If I am to understand Bloomberg's ad agency, the world is sitting around passively. Drinking coffee. Making sexist (but not too-politically incorrect) jokes, watching talking heads on BTV tell us what is going to happen, or erroneous attributions about why something just happened. Then, quite randomly perhaps, the market MOVES, and everyone else NOW, AFTER THE MOVE, with the help of their Bloomberg system, takes note of the move, and decides how they are going to react to THE MOVE. And, according to Bloomberg, this is what THEY NEED, because this is the way THEY look at the market, and Bloomberg can help you stay on top.

Think of the absurdity of this. Think of it multiplied across the Bloomberg installed base. Across the number of trading rooms of banks and brokerages across the world. Wait. Watch. See somebody else do something significant, and then try to jump on the train. And then, when IF you manage to successfully get on the train, and the train is, by chance, going in the direction you expect, you then, one would suppose, go back to the water-cooler, and wait for someone else to do something significant in the opposite direction, which  you would, by extension, follow again trying to leap from the train to safety before a larger train wreck. Does that about sum it up?