The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
Bloomberg L.P. is a privately held American financial data, software and media company. Its flagship product, the Bloomberg Terminal, first sold in December 1982 as the Market Master terminal, is a subscription desktop system that gives finance professionals real-time and historical market data, news, research, analytics, portfolio and risk tools, Instant Bloomberg messaging and trade execution across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and derivatives, accessed through a proprietary keyboard and multi-panel interface. Bloomberg Data License, the company's enterprise data business, distributes that same underlying content, reference, pricing, fundamentals, estimates, ESG, regulatory and corporate-actions data, directly into client systems via REST API, SFTP, bulk files or cloud delivery rather than through the desktop Terminal. Bloomberg's differentiator is consistency: the same dataset that shows up on a trader's Terminal screen is what gets licensed into a bank's back-office, compliance and portfolio-management systems, which competing vendors typically split more sharply between desktop and enterprise-data products. Its real-time enterprise feed, B-PIPE, aggregates data from more than 330 exchanges and 5,000 contributors across roughly 35 million instruments for non-display and algorithmic use, while EMSX, its execution and order-management system, connects firms to more than 1,600 brokers and 2,800 algorithmic, direct-market-access and program-trading destinations. A subsidiary, Bloomberg SEF LLC, is registered with the CFTC as a swap execution facility and operates a security-based swap execution facility registered with the SEC, extending the data business into regulated multi-asset swap trading in rates, credit and currencies. Customers span sell-side banks and broker-dealers, buy-side asset managers and hedge funds, corporations, government agencies and regulators. Bloomberg was founded on October 1, 1981, as Innovative Market Systems by Michael Bloomberg together with Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan and Charles Zegar, funded by a partnership payout Michael Bloomberg received after Salomon Brothers was acquired. Merrill Lynch became the first customer, buying 20 terminals and a 30 percent equity stake for 30 million dollars, and the firm was renamed Bloomberg L.P. in 1986. Michael Bloomberg holds roughly 88 percent ownership today, after Bloomberg bought back Merrill Lynch's remaining stake in 2008. As of 2025 the company employed about 26,000 people across 176 offices and reported roughly 15 billion dollars in annual revenue; the Terminal has historically supplied the large majority of that revenue, and Wikipedia records 325,000 Terminal subscribers worldwide as of 2022. Data License content spans more than 70 million instruments and 40,000-plus data fields, publishing over 100 billion data points daily across more than 8,000 curated datasets. In February 2026, Bloomberg SEF LLC filed a request with the SEC for no-action relief on order-book requirements for certain permitted transactions on its security-based swap execution facility, evidence the swap-execution business remains an active part of Bloomberg's current regulatory footprint rather than a legacy sideline.
