April 19, 2010
Dow Jones Financial News Online
Bloomberg Goes Head to Head with Reuters in Global Debt Markets
Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, two of the largest news
organisations, differ significantly in their coverage of global debt
markets, with Bloomberg offering a more focused service, according
to a recent study.
Research published last week, by US-based advisory firm Burton-Taylor International Consulting, found that Bloomberg offered “a generally more tightly focused volume of fixed-income content across a wider number of fixed-income instruments”.
The study also found that the news services of
the two companies differed significantly in
terms of focus and in the ways in which events
were reported.
While Bloomberg news is concentrated on
government debt, followed by corporate and
emerging market debt,
Thomson Reuters
places a greater emphasis on emerging market
debt, followed by government and corporate debt
instruments.
Additionally, more than half of Bloomberg’s debt
news items was in the form of headline-only
alerts, while this method only accounted for
about 35% of Reuters’ daily debt news output.
The two news organisations jointly account for
more than 60% of the spending on global
financial information, which totaled $23bn
(€17bn) during 2009, according to Burton-Taylor.
The total spend on fixed-income market data was
$3.7bn, the third most lucrative, behind
investment management and equity sales and
trading news. This amount was down only 3.51% on
the previous year.
Revenues from fixed income have helped to prop
up profits of investment banks over the past 12
months.
Last week,
JP Morgan reported that revenues from
its fixed-income division for the first quarter
of this year were up 12% on the same period last
year, at $5.5bn. In comparison, revenues from
its equities team had come down by close to a
third, at $1.5bn, over the same time period.
The Burton-Taylor study suggested that it was
Bloomberg that had benefited most from this
sustained demand, collecting more than 50% of
revenues generated in the sector. In comparison,
Thomson Reuters took 15% of revenues, in spite
of the fact that it delivered an average of two
more fixed-income related commentaries per day
than Bloomberg.
From a geographical perspective, the study found
that just over a third of Bloomberg’s news was
coded as relevant to the US market, compared to
nearly half of Thomson Reuters’ items.
In terms of government debt, Bloomberg gave a
much greater focus to markets such as Japan,
China and India, and in its corporate debt news
it gave “dramatically more content relevant to a
wider range of countries”, including those in
Europe and Latin America.
However, Thomson Reuters gave greater coverage
to debt derivatives markets, with volumes of
news items double those produced by Bloomberg.
A spokeswoman for Thomson Reuters suggested that
not all of the company’s products were covered
in the survey, adding that news items were given
to users depending on their preferences.
She said: “In addition to its core markets news
offering, Reuters offers specialist news
services such as IFR (IFR Markets) and LPC (Loan
Pricing Corporation) that have not been included
in the study.”
She continued: “Reuters codes to the asset
people are interested in and then to the asset
class. We may not necessarily code down to the
actual instrument, allowing people who are
searching for and investing in a particular
instrument to find what they need. We try to
present our stories in a way that can be easily
adapted to our clients’ workflow rather than
presenting an artificial metric just to measure
volume.”
Bloomberg declined to comment.
by Tim Cave
Latest Burton-Taylor News
May 12, 2013
The Financial Times
Bloomberg scrambles to reassure users
In Michael Bloomberg’s autobiography,
written before the Bloomberg founder became mayor of New York, he
recalled pitching the idea of adding news to his financial data
terminals to Matt Winkler, the man who ended up running Bloomberg News.
Mr Winkler replied by asking how Bloomberg would react if the newswire
found out that the chairman of its biggest client had run off to Rio de
Janeiro with $5m from the company coffers and and the company called up
to kill the story?.
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Latest
Burton-Taylor Research
April 10, 2013
Public Relations Information & Software Global
Share & Segment Sizing 2013
Burton-Taylor delivers a comprehensive, 88 page analysis of public relations information & software supplier share, demand segmentation, vendor demographics and survey results of key user expectations. The analysis is sufficiently detailed as to allow public relations information & software providers or industry analysts to clearly understand competitive positioning currently, historically, globally, regionally and within individual demand segments and to enable public relations information & software users to make better informed, more confident and more appropriate purchase decisions which could result in greater profitability.
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