April 12, 2010

Inside Market Data - Special Report

Report Compares Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters FI News

A comparative analysis of fixed income news coverage from Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters conducted by Burton-Taylor International Consulting LLC reveals that while the two vendors deliver roughly the same number of fixed income news items per day, they differ in focus by region and asset class coverage.

The study, which looked at English-language fixed income news from the Bloomberg Professional News service and Reuters Markets News-delivered via the Bloomberg terminal and Reuters 3000 Xtra, respectively-found that on average, Bloomberg distributes 1,544 fixed income-related news items each day, compared to 1,620 delivered by Thomson Reuters.

Around half of Bloomberg's news items were headline-only "alerts"-the remainder being full stories-while alerts comprised only about one-third of Thomson Reuters' coverage. This is similar to the results of Burton-Taylor's previous study on the two vendors' financial news services (IMD, April 27, 2009), reflecting a possible difference in philosophy between the vendors, with Bloomberg generally placing more emphasis on delivering key facts quickly while Thomson Reuters emphasizes pulling together complete stories, says Douglas B Taylor, managing partner at Burton-Taylor.

Burton-Taylor also looked at sub-sets of different topics within fixed income news on each platform, including stories relevant to different regions and specific fixed income securities over a minimum of six days. This analysis showed that while Bloomberg generally delivers more than twice as much corporate and Eurobond debt content, and more mortgage-backed, asset-backed, agency and covered bond content than its rival, Thomson Reuters delivers more derivatives news and debt commentary, as well as roughly five times as much municipal bond content as Bloomberg-though these trends may vary when filtered by different regions.

While Bloomberg tends to take a broader approach to tagging the relevance of its stories and returning a wider scope of information for search terms in its general financial news, "for bond news, Bloomberg searches were really focused on fixed income, or on bonds specifically, and retrieved narrower results than Thomson Reuters, which may be a reflection of Bloomberg's deep fixed income roots," Taylor says.

Thomson Reuters' fixed income news also tends to be more US-centric, with 46 percent of its content tagged as relevant to the US market, compared to 34 percent of Bloomberg's, which could reflect greater coverage of US fixed income instruments by Thomson Reuters, or merely the vendor's broader tagging, Taylor says, while Bloomberg delivers more content tagged as relevant to the Latin American, Chinese and Indian markets.

The report also compares the top stories from each news service at the same moment in time, broken down by region and topic, to see how many debt-related stories would be prioritized as a top story by each vendor. Bloomberg tended to include fixed income news items in its top stories more often than Thomson Reuters, which again may also reflect Bloomberg's fixed income focus, Taylor says.

"As news increasingly becomes a differentiator in financial markets and it gets easier to gather and distribute information via the Internet, the focus for news providers is in providing more relevance and context for professional readers of their service, particularly in a critical area like fixed income," Taylor says.

by Vicki Chan