Random Analogies
"What makes the terminals so popular on Wall Street is not just their comprehensive data, but their social value. The Bloomberg terminal is like the Facebook of Wall Street; a social tool that connects the financial world. The trading terminal has one major advantage: Bloomberg Instant, a widely popular chat/messaging system that Bloomberg sells as instant access to important people, and logs 200m messages - or 15m to 20m chats a day among 310,000 subscribers. Here's the ad copy on it, which gives you a sense of what Bloomberg is really selling through its terminals: influence."
This is one reason the market moves so fast; there are 310,000 big money smart money people efficiently connected and getting information faster than those not plugged into this expensive network.
"When unstable radioactive minerals are trapped in a mineral, they begin to decay. The mineral is like a tiny hour glass collecting products of decay and can be age-dated. The rate of decay varies with the radioactive element but is a constant. As an element such as uranium decays, it may lose protons and thus its atomic number and chemical identity changes. The new element created by the radioactive decay is called a daughter element. For example: uranium, the parent, element spontaneously decays to lead, the daughter element."
