A financial data terminal is the screen that analysts, fund managers and traders read all day, with live prices, company accounts, news and analysis in one place. It is also called a market data terminal or a financial workstation. The companies that sell terminals also sell data feeds. A data feed sends the same data straight into a fund's own software, with no person reading it.
What does the terminal show? It shows the live prices of shares, bonds, currencies and commodities from markets around the world. It shows each company's accounts for many years. It shows analysts' estimates of each company's future earnings, and data on who owns its shares. It also shows credit ratings, index values, ratings of mutual funds, and breaking news.
Consider an analyst at an insurance company who is deciding whether to buy a cement company's bonds. On the terminal, she pulls up the cement company's accounts for the last ten years. She compares its debt with its earnings, and compares both with four other cement companies. She looks up the bond's grade from a credit rating agency. She also reads the latest news about the company, which arrives from a news agency. In twenty minutes, she has what she needs to write her note.
The data feed matters as much as the screen. Every evening, a fund's investment management system receives, through a data feed, the closing price of every share and bond the fund holds. It uses these prices to value the fund. Firms connect their software to the feed through an API, a fixed format in which one program asks another program for data. The live prices come from each stock exchange's matching engine, the software that matches buyers with sellers.
Terminals are expensive. A single licence of the most widely used terminals can cost more than ₹20 lakh a year. So large firms use market data management software to track who uses which licence.
Much of the data is collected and checked by large teams of people, many of them in India. They read company filings and enter the figures into databases. AI models now do more of this reading. The data companies are also adding assistants that answer questions from their data, a kind of AI for equity research.