A data terminal company. A newswire. A broker-dealer.
Bloomberg is all of these things. But did you know Bloomberg is also now a registered investment advisor?
Bloomberg Wealth, which does business under the name BloombergBlack, is not yet a big operation. It employs just 33 people, only nine of whom perform investment advisory functions.
There's a twitter account @bloombergblack but it's never tweeted, follows no one and has only 11 followers (I wasn't able to confirm that this belongs to the brokerage). And there's a blog with some relatively banal market news and investment advice.
Odds are that many Wall Street customers of Bloomberg have never even heard of BloombergBlack. Certainly Bloomberg's marketing so far has been very quiet, perhaps because it feels a little awkward about going into business in competition with the people who pay $20,000 a year for Bloomberg terminals.
But it is definitely up and running as an online wealth management company—kind of. It's more or less in beta, as the tech folks say. Right now BloombergBlack is only accepting a "limited number of investors." You have to request an invite—and you can't even put in a request unless you have somehow received a referral code. If accepted, you'll get a 60-day free trial. After that the service will cost you a hundred bucks a month.
What's the service?