Financial research databases: market platforms
Acquire market data with explicit provenance and screening
Market platforms provide licensed prices, returns, news and other financial series. Bloomberg Terminal and LSEG services differ in coverage, identifiers and extraction conventions; Datastream is a historical-data service. Refinitiv is a retired brand, with its products now delivered within LSEG businesses. These are data sources and interfaces rather than research methods, and institutional access determines what can be reproduced.
Use when the research question requires market histories or financial news beyond open datasets. Check actual entitlements and historical coverage before committing to a design or assuming an export can be shared.
Strengths
- Broad market coverage and integrated identifier systems
- Historical series can support replicable extraction when queries are documented
Limitations
- Licences can constrain access and redistribution
- Vendor defaults, adjustments and inactive-security handling can change results
Know the boundary
A familiar vendor name does not make every downloaded series analysis-ready, and Refinitiv is no longer the current operating brand.