∺nd for 24 years, I have been frustrated with their pricing. Bloomberg declined to comment for this story.īanks, of course, have faced economic struggles since the financial crisis, making Bloomberg terminals an onerous expense. Ive been a Bloomberg user for close to 25 years, says Seth Shalov, a partner and portfolio manager at $4 billion MAI Capital Management in Cleveland.
Whether Ray Dalio or Ray Daytrader, everyone pays the same price: $25,000 a year for one terminal and $22,600 a year per terminal for more than one. The basic complaint about Bloomberg is its price always, forever, infuriatingly, the price.
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(Bloomberg doesnt have physical terminals anymore, but rather a software package officially named Bloomberg Terminal.) At the same time, another generation of upstart competitors, including and Symphony, has emerged. And last year, for only the second time in the companys 35-year history, the terminal total shrank. Its terminal count has barely risen over the last five years, according to Burton-Taylor. Yet large-scale shifts in banking and money management including compressed margins and, correspondingly, shrinking information-service budgets are causing a mature Bloomberg more pain than copycats ever did. Up to this point, any so-called Bloomberg killer has ended up as roadkill itself, says Taylor, who now runs his own firm, Burton-Taylor International Consulting. Since then a handful of other products have taken on the mantle of Bloomberg killer. The project collapsed lawsuits ensued accusations of intellectual property theft were lodged.
In 1993 relations between Reuters and Capital Market Decisions soured. It wasnt a bad product, but it wasnt a Bloomberg killer. It was the first product to be dubbed a Bloomberg killer, and that was unfortunate, says Douglas Taylor, a former Reuters executive who worked on the project. But the alleged Watergate tactics failed, as would Decision 2000.
Reuters played hardball but it also played dirty, evidence suggests: In the late 1990s, federal prosecutors obtained more than 100 communications between Reuters officials and a consulting company that investigators believed was hired to steal information from Bloomberg, according to The New York Times. Stephen Levkoff, with developing an investment analytics system on par with the one luring away clients. Reuters tasked Capital Market Decisions, a firm led by ex-Smith Barney executive J. Dubbed Decision 2000, the projects goal was no less than the destruction of Reuters competitor and its terminals.īut to beat Michael Bloombergs brainchild, the legacy brand first needed to rival it. In 1989, Reuters the legendary international news agency based in London launched an ambitious and secretive project.īloomberg, a relatively young New Yorkbased company, had been eating into Reuters market, providing analytics and data to Wall Streets Masters of the Universe via proprietary terminals.