Which platform would you recommend if you wanted historical data on equities of various (Hong Kong/Taiwan/European etc) countries. Not so much looking for the platform to be able to execute or finance those trades. Simply need it for research. Bloomberg comes to mind just wondering if there isn't a more cost effective solution.
http://finance.yahoo.com/ You can download (for free) historical daily data on a huge collection of stocks. Format is .csv so can be loaded directly in Excel and from there in any database.