The bloomberg terminal

Working as a Wall Street trader, Michael Bloomberg was successful in his own right as a general partner heading up equity trading at investment bank Salomon Brothers; a corporate buyout can be a real career killer and Bloomberg was offered a $10 million redundancy package in 1981 - not too bad at all. Using the funds from his payout, he took his intimate knowledge of Wall Street finance to develop a terminal system with features and screens dedicated purely to finance.

The terminal is not cheap, professional stockbrokers and investment firms have the revenue to justify such expenditures, all but the most successful investors have to seek other options placing independent investors at a disadvantage. The exorbitant price is not purely for the hardware, the terminal is loaded with real time information for traders to make buy/sell decisions in a multitude of markets for a multitude of products. Supporting the Bloomberg terminal, the Bloomberg finance is channel shown on cable television is an informative program designed for the finance professional but equally informative for novice investors.