Bill Gross didn’t invent the Bloomberg terminal.
He emphasized that fact when he called to chat last week, suggesting that initial coverage of his recent gift of a terminal keyboard to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History focused too much on him and not enough on the machine that helped him become the Bond King.
His status as a bond-trading legend will no doubt add gravitas when the keyboard is displayed in the museum’s American Enterprise exhibit, where it’s slated to occupy a spot alongside other historic items, including Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
Gross nonetheless wants people to understand “the importance of the machine itself.”
“I didn’t make the machine or anything,” he said. “They discovered that my terminal was a really old one and would be cool to put [the keyboard] on the Smithsonian exhibit.”
He also donated a couple of Beanie Babies—a bull and a bear—and a pair of dice. They harken back to his earlier trading days at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, which Gross founded in 1971 and helped grow into a powerhouse with nearly $2 trillion in assets.
“It’s nice that my little bull and bear and the pair of dice would go on the exhibit,” said Gross, who’s now with Janus Capital Group Inc. “I look forward to having my grandkids see it and everything, but it’s really about the machine.”
The key aspect of a Bloomberg terminal is the software system provided by Bloomberg LP. Customers pay about $24,000 a year for a subscription to the service, which allows them to monitor real-time financial data, execute trades, and communicate with other users via the system’s proprietary messaging service.
‘Critical’
“The terminal and the machine have been critical to the financial industry for 20, 30 years,” Gross said. “In terms of its importance to business and to the finance industry—which is a growing part of Orange County and Newport Beach—it’s almost unique. You can almost compare it to IBM in the 1970s with the PCs, and to Apple, I suppose, in the last five to 10 years.”
Gross, 71, recalled the high demand for early IBM computer systems in the 1970s, when he was just starting his career in finance.
“When I was going to grad school at UCLA, my first year at Pacific Life—back then it was Pacific Mutual—we had one IBM 360,” he recalled. “So you had to sign up for time, and so on.”
Gross said he spends several hours on end on the terminal “just looking” through data.
“The terminal allows portfolio managers and anybody that has an interest in the financial markets to access just a deep, deep source of information,” he said. “I myself, personally, on weekends and just today, too—I spend five, six, seven hours … looking for historical comparisons in terms of markets and statistics, [price-to-earnings] ratios and patterns in trading.”
Gross said he used the keyboard that went to the Smithsonian for about 25 years. It was a run that spanned a revolution in technology, but he hung onto it as new options came and went.
“They tried to modernize me at Pimco, bring in things, new keyboards … and I just said, ‘I’m fine with this one,’ ” Gross said. “They made some accommodations with the new system and the old keyboard—that sort of reflects my personality.”
Near Pimco
His new keyboard can be found just a block away from Pimco’s headquarters in Newport Center. He goes to Janus’ office to pore over data these days, charting a course for the firm’s unconstrained global bond fund, which has about $1.5 billion in assets, a small percentage of the firm’s total and an even smaller fraction of Pimco’s portfolio.
“It’s going fine here; it’s interesting—I’m just a block away from Pimco,” Gross said. “I’m on the fourth floor here, and I can see my old office on the 20th floor at Pimco. It’s sort of interesting. It instills the competitive fire in me.”
That’s how the call ended.
I can only imagine that Gross got right back to his terminal.
