The LSE Directory / Charting platforms
The Bloomberg Terminal is a subscription software and data service from Bloomberg L.P., accessed through Bloomberg Professional Services, that gives financial professionals real-time and historical market data, news, research, analytics, charting, order and execution management, and a proprietary messaging network on a single integrated workstation. It is built around a customised keyboard with dedicated financial-market keys and a multi-panel display, and it covers equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and derivatives, alongside company fundamentals, economic data and regulatory filings. The platform's differentiator against rivals such as LSEG (formerly Refinitiv Eikon) and FactSet is depth and breadth rather than price: it bundles cross-asset data, sell-side and Bloomberg Intelligence research, compliance and risk tools, and Instant Bloomberg, a closed messaging network connecting subscribers to counterparties, which functions as a network-effect moat since a trader often needs the Terminal simply to reach other traders on it. Bloomberg also sells the underlying data separately from the desktop product through the Bloomberg API (BLPAPI), the B-PIPE real-time data feed and Data License for enterprise and quant use, so the Terminal is one delivery channel among several for the same underlying dataset. Its core customers are asset managers, hedge funds, banks, broker-dealers, corporate treasuries and pension funds, priced as an institutional tool rather than a retail one. Bloomberg L.P. was founded on October 1, 1981 by Michael Bloomberg together with Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan and Charles Zegar, after Michael Bloomberg left Salomon Brothers with a partner equity payout he used to start the company, originally named Innovative Market Systems. Merrill Lynch was the first customer, buying a 30 percent stake for 30 million dollars in exchange for a five year restriction on sales to its competitors; the first terminal shipped in December 1982. The company is headquartered at Bloomberg Tower on Lexington Avenue in New York, reported roughly 15 billion dollars in 2024 revenue with the Terminal historically generating the large majority of that figure, and employed about 26,000 people across 176 offices worldwide as of 2025. Michael Bloomberg remains the majority owner; Vlad Kliatchko, who joined Bloomberg as an engineer in 2003 and later led global engineering and then product, became Chief Executive Officer in 2023. Single-seat list pricing rose 6.5 percent for contracts renewing from January 1, 2025, to 31,980 dollars a year (28,320 dollars per seat for multi-terminal clients), following a 9.6 percent increase in 2023; the standard commitment is a two-year contract. Bloomberg has been layering generative AI into the Terminal, starting with BloombergGPT, a 50-billion parameter large language model it built in house on a finance-heavy training set for tasks such as sentiment analysis and generating Bloomberg Query Language (BQL) code. More recently it has shipped AI-generated news summaries across an expanded set of sources and, in beta, ASKB, a conversational AI interface for querying company and market data, trends and documents directly on the Terminal alongside its existing workflows.
