Bloomberg Terminal

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Bloomberg Professional Terminal

The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer system that enables financial professionals to access the Bloomberg Professional service through which users can monitor and analyze real-time financial market data movements and place trades. The system also provides news, price quotes, and messaging across its proprietary secure network. Most large financial firms have subscriptions to the Bloomberg service, which costs $1,500 to $1,800 per terminal per month (as of 2005) ^[1]. Many exchanges charge their own additional fees for access to real time price feeds across the terminal. The same applies to various news organizations.

1 History
2 Architecture
3 Bloomberg Keyboard
4 Competitors
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] History

The Bloomberg Terminal concept began in 1981 when a former stock broker at Salomon Brothers, Michael Bloomberg (now the Mayor of New York City), left Salomon to launch a company called Innovative Market Systems. The company's goal was to develop a financial database and resource tool that would be utilized by the finance community. In 1982, Merrill Lynch became the new company's first customer, installing 20 Market Master terminals and investing $30 million in the company.^[2]^[3] ^[4] In 1986, Innovative Market Systems changed its name to Bloomberg LP. By 1988, 5,000 terminals were installed and by 2001 that number reached 156,000 terminals. Over the years, as computing power expanded, so has the flexibility and functionality of the terminal. As of 2006 the Bloomberg Terminal held about 31% of the total market share (compared to Reuters 22%)^[5].

[edit] Architecture

The terminal implements 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 Wireless Application Protocol (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. Recent years have seen a shift in focus towards C++, and an embedded scripting engine on both client and server side.^{[citation needed]} Each server machine runs multiple instances of the server process. By utilizing a proprietary form of a context switching the servers keep track of the state of each end user, allowing user interaction to be handled by different server processes. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) code is also proprietary.

[edit] Bloomberg Keyboard

Although the look and feel of the Bloomberg keyboard is very similar to the standard computer keyboard, there are several subtle differences that help a user navigate through the system. The yellow hot keys along the top of the keyboard are used to enter sectors:

GOVT - Government (US Treasury and non-US Government securities)
CORP - Corporate Debt
MTGE - Mortgage Securities
M-Mkt - Money market
MUNI - Municipal Debt
PFD - Preferred Shares
EQUITY - Equity Shares
COMDTY - Commodity Markets
INDEX - Indices
CURNCY - Currency Markets

[edit] Competitors

Leading competitors for electronic financial data provision include Thomson Reuters Corp, (the name of the firm formed by the eventual merger of Thomson Corporation and Reuters^[6]) with the Reuters 3000 Xtra products family, FactSet Research Systems, Dow Jones, and Capital IQ.