For Bloomberg you can contact a rep here: http://about.bloomberg.com/professional/profservice.html The last time I asked about service at home the cost was $1,600/month. Don't know about Instinet...
Last I heard an Instinet machine was running $600 a month. This was a year ago though, if they were smart they have lowered it along with their ECN fees.
Its the ultimate news feed.....also has every kind of analysis you can think of on there....a lot of features that I haven't even figured out yet......nyse open book on it is great......betas, sectors, implied and historical volitility etc.....all at the touch of a button.....its great to have but pricey if you are paying the fee yourself
I think Bloomberg's down to about $1300/month now. That's before market data fees or T1 line. Yes, it's very very expensive. However, it is an amazing tool. If you're just looking for simple quotes or whatnot, there are many cheaper choices (pretty much anyone). But if you want equity and bond research, news, realtime prices and other data in excel, options greeks, converts, wide variety of APIs, etc., it is really the only choice. If you've got a trading idea that will probably make you money, and some capital to throw at it, then I'd say just get one. Mine's more than paid for itself many times just by having the availability of data and details when you come up with another idea of something to trade.
A bloomberg machine if you know how to use it properly can pay for itself. I only know the basics, I mean literally 1/50th of it, if that but it really is the best all around trading tool out there. It would get everything.....DJ newswire, PR newswire, SEC filings, you name it. If you needed to find out what stocks were related to what stocks....punch it in, it would give you an instant correlation. Wanted to run a seach for a particular candlestick pattern, unusual volume, insider sales, etc, etc.....piece of cake. Back when stocks were much more lofty, we used to play peg the strike on options exp day or the day before, one guy, usually me. ;-) would check out all the mojo stocks to see where the open interest was crowded and we would play the stocks to well....peg that strike as they say. It actually worked. I had heard Cramer and some other knuckle heads talk and write about it before we actually started to doing it and wondered if it really was that easy. I won't say it is easy, because I have certainly see it not work but more often than not, it did. Also, some trading platforms keep track of it these days , but we used to get the VWAP off of Bloomberg too going into the close. An instinet machine keeps track of that too as well as some of the other platforms these days, but it was helpful in gaming which stocks might get busted up on the close as prices tended to fade toward that VWAP if the were a fair amount away from it. One other thing we used it for, is you could pull up which Market Makers were active in a particular stock. For example if you were going to take a big position in say MUSE, you might yell at someone to punch MUSE into the Bloomberg and see who the ax market maker was so you knew who to watch or lean on. That type of thing. Again some trading platforms do that for you, but some don't. Bloomberg does. Cheers.