FINANCIAL REGULATION COURSES
Bloomberg LP is a privately held American financial data, software, and media company headquartered at Bloomberg Tower, 731 Lexington Avenue, New York City — founded in October 1981 by Michael Bloomberg and co-founders Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan, and Charles Zegar, with an initial strategic investment from Merrill Lynch that gave the firm its first institutional foothold on Wall Street.
As of 2024 Bloomberg LP generates approximately fifteen billion dollars in annual revenue, deriving more than eighty percent of that revenue from subscriptions to its core product — the Bloomberg Terminal — and employing approximately 26,000 people across 176 offices worldwide.
Bloomberg is not a bank, a broker-dealer, or a FINRA member firm in the conventional sense. It is the foundational information infrastructure of the global financial markets — the platform through which the vast majority of professional securities industry participants access real-time market data, execute trades, communicate with counterparties, and conduct financial analysis on every asset class tested throughout the securities licensing examination curriculum.
The Founding — From Salomon Brothers to Wall Street's Data Layer
Michael Bloomberg earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1966 and joined Salomon Brothers as a clerk, eventually becoming head of equity trading and later responsible for developing the firm's in-house computerised financial systems.
When Phibro Corporation acquired Salomon Brothers in 1981, Bloomberg was dismissed as a partner and received a ten million dollar buyout for his partnership interest. Rather than retire, he identified what he saw as a critical gap in how Wall Street processed and accessed financial information — and used his buyout to found Innovative Market Systems with Secunda, MacMillan, and Zegar.
The firm's first product — the Bloomberg Terminal — was launched in December 1982. Merrill Lynch became the first institutional customer and purchased a stake in the company for thirty million dollars, initially restricting Bloomberg from marketing the terminal to Merrill's direct competitors for five years. By 1991 Bloomberg had ten thousand terminals installed on trading desks across the financial industry. The company was renamed Bloomberg LP in 1986.
The Bloomberg Terminal — The Industry Standard
The Bloomberg Terminal — officially the Bloomberg Professional Service — is the flagship product and the primary revenue engine of Bloomberg LP, accounting for the overwhelming majority of the company's fifteen billion dollars in annual revenue through subscription fees of approximately twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars per terminal per year.
The terminal provides subscribers with real-time price data on equities, bonds, currencies, commodities, derivatives, and every other major asset class across global markets.
It provides analytical tools for portfolio analysis, risk management, options pricing, yield calculations, and financial modelling. It provides a proprietary messaging and communication system — Bloomberg Messaging — through which hundreds of thousands of financial professionals communicate with counterparties, clients, and colleagues across the industry daily. It provides access to Bloomberg News — the firm's global financial news service — and to historical data archives covering decades of market history across all asset classes.
For securities industry professionals the terminal is the primary real-time source for the bond prices, equity prices, yield spreads, derivative valuations, economic data releases, and corporate announcements that inform investment decisions and are referenced throughout the securities licensing examination curriculum. The yield curve data tested in the Yield Curve entry of this dictionary, the Treasury security prices tested in the Treasury Bill, Treasury Note, and Treasury Bond entries, the equity index values referenced in the S and P 500 entry — all of these are accessed in professional practice primarily through the Bloomberg Terminal.
Bloomberg's Broader Platform — Data, News, and Media
Beyond the terminal, Bloomberg LP has developed a comprehensive financial information ecosystem that extends across multiple platforms and media.
Bloomberg News — launched in 1990 with journalist Matthew Winkler as editor in chief — is a global financial news service that competes directly with Reuters and the Wall Street Journal for primacy in financial journalism, covering markets, economics, corporate news, and regulatory developments across all major financial centres worldwide. Bloomberg News feeds content directly into the Bloomberg Terminal and is distributed through bloomberg.com, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Radio, and Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
Bloomberg Intelligence — the firm's research and analytics arm — provides industry analysis, company research, and economic commentary that supplements the raw data of the terminal with interpretive analysis and thematic research across sectors and asset classes.
Bloomberg's Aladdin platform — an enterprise risk management and portfolio management system — serves institutional investors including pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and asset managers who use it to manage portfolio risk, run scenario analyses, and monitor compliance across complex multi-asset portfolios. The BlackRock-developed Aladdin system was licensed to Bloomberg and has become a widely used institutional risk infrastructure tool independent of the Bloomberg Terminal itself.
Bloomberg and the Securities Regulatory Framework
Bloomberg LP intersects with the securities regulatory framework in several specific and practically important ways.
Bloomberg operates trading execution platforms — Bloomberg Electronic Trading — that allow institutional participants to execute fixed income and other transactions electronically through the Bloomberg Terminal infrastructure. These trading facilities are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and subject to applicable exchange and alternative trading system regulations.
Bloomberg's fixed income trading platform functions as a FINRA-regulated venue for certain transaction types — connecting buyers and sellers of corporate bonds, municipal bonds, and government securities through an electronic marketplace integrated into the Bloomberg Terminal that provides pre-trade price discovery and post-trade reporting consistent with TRACE reporting requirements.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority uses Bloomberg data in its market surveillance operations — the trading activity monitoring systems that detect unusual volume, price movements, and trading patterns consistent with potential insider trading, market manipulation, or other securities law violations are informed by the real-time data infrastructure that Bloomberg provides to the industry.
Bloomberg's Role in the Securities Examination Context
Bloomberg appears throughout the securities licensing examination curriculum not as a direct examination topic but as the institutional context within which market data, pricing, and analysis occur in professional practice.
The yield spreads discussed in the Fixed Income entry, the bid-ask spreads discussed in the Bid Price and Ask Price entries, the options pricing mechanics discussed in the Delta, Theta, Vega, and Gamma entries, and the yield curve data discussed in the Yield Curve entry — all of these concepts are accessed, monitored, and analysed in professional practice primarily through Bloomberg terminals on trading desks, in portfolio management offices, and in compliance and research functions across every major financial institution.
Understanding that Bloomberg is the primary data infrastructure of the professional securities industry — not merely a news service or a financial data vendor — is essential context for any securities industry professional entering a career in which they will encounter Bloomberg terminals as a daily professional tool.
