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 the Bloomberg Professional service through which users can monitor and analyze real-time financial market data and place trades on the electronic trading platform. The system also provides news, price quotes, and messaging across its proprietary secure network.

Most large financial firms have subscriptions to the Bloomberg Professional service. 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. It is available for an annual fee of $20,000 per user ($25,080 per year for the small number of firms that use only one terminal). As of October 2016, there were 325,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers worldwide.

Sales from the Bloomberg terminal account for more than 85 percent of Bloomberg L.P.'s annual revenue. The financial data vendor's proprietary computer system starts at $25,080 per user per year.

The terminal implements a client-server architecture with the server running on a multiprocessor Unix platform. The client, used by end users to interact with the system, is a Windows application that typically connects directly through a router provided by Bloomberg and installed on-site. End users can also make use of an extra service (Bloomberg Anywhere) to allow the Windows application to connect via internet/IP, or Web access via a Citrix client. There are also applications that allow mobile access via Android, BlackBerry, and iOS. The server side of the terminal was originally developed using mostly the programming languages Fortran and C. Recent years have seen a transition towards C++ and embedded JavaScript on the clients and servers.

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