Bloomberg Terminal

The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer system that enables financial professionals to access the Bloomberg Professional® service through which users can monitor and analyse real-time financial market data movements and place trades. The system also provides news and messaging across its proprietary secure network. Most large financial firms have subscriptions to the Bloomberg service, which costs $1,500 per terminal per month. Many exchanges charge their own additional fees for access to real time price feeds across the terminal. The same applies to various news organizations. The Bloomberg Terminal is the core product of Bloomberg L.P. (founded by the current Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg) and is considered one of the leading service providers in its field.

The Terminal is a Client-Server architecture with the Server running on a multiprocessor UNIX platform. The Client, used by the End Users to interact with the system is a Windows Application. End Users can also make use of an extra service ("Bloomberg Anywhere ℠") that allows Web access to this Windows Application via a Citrix client. There is also a WAP portal and BlackBerry application to allow mobile access. The server side of The Terminal has been developed using mostly the Fortran and C programming languages. Each server machine runs multiple instances of the server process. By utilizing a form of a context switch the servers keep track of the state of each End User, allowing user interaction to be handled by different server processes. The GUI code is also proprietary.

Leading competitors for electronic financial data provision include Thomson Corporation, Reuters, FactSet Research Systems, Dow Jones, and Capital IQ.

See also

• Bloomberg

External links

• Bloomberg Professional
• What is a Bloomberg Terminal? (outdated)