Bloomberg Terminal
The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer software system provided by the financial data vendor Bloomberg L.P. that enables professionals in the financial service sector and other industries to access Bloomberg Professional Services through which users can monitor and analyze real-time financial market data and place trades on the electronic trading platform. It was developed by employees working for businessman Michael Bloomberg. The system also provides news, price quotes, and messaging across its proprietary secure network. It is well known among the financial community for its black interface, which has become a recognizable trait of the service. The first version of the terminal was released in December 1982. Most large financial firms have subscriptions to Bloomberg Professional Services. Many exchanges charge their own additional fees for access to real time price feeds across the terminal. The same applies to various news organizations. All Bloomberg Terminals are leased in two-year cycles (in the late 1990s and early 2000s, three-year contracts were an option), with leases originally based on how many displays were connected to each terminal (this predated the move to Windows-based application). Most Bloomberg setups have between two and six displays. As a data analytics and electronic trading platform, the Bloomberg terminal is available for an annual fee of around 27k per year for subscribers that use only one terminal. As of 2022, there were 325,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers worldwide. In 1981, Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers. He was given no severance package, but owned $10 million worth of equity as a partner at the firm. Using this money, Bloomberg, having designed in-house computerized financial systems for Salomon, set up a data services company named Innovative Market Systems (IMS) based on his belief that Wall Street would pay a premium for high-quality business information, delivered instantaneously on computer terminals in a variety of usable formats.
