The terminal revolution: Reuters and Bloomberg as global providers of financial and economic news, 1960-2020

Gerben Bakker

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We identify a previously underappreciated data revolution starting in the 1960s, in which business information firms adopted ICT very early on to automate market data sales. Before this ‘terminal revolution’, securities firms could barely cope with the paperwork of growing trading volumes, forcing the NYSE to close on Wednesdays to allow them to catch up. The terminal revolution placed computer screens on every client’s desk, changed how data was accessed and acted on, and created virtual trading floors, foreshadowing almost all stages the internet would go through some three decades later. We focus on early entrant Reuters and late entrant Bloomberg, which came to dominate global market data provision, discussing other firms along the way. We find that theory on sunk costs and market structure (Sutton, 1998) can explain how the exploding market remained highly concentrated, despite many new entrants. We also find that financial and business news (subject to Arrow’s paradox) was a complement to data (not subject to Arrow’s paradox), and barely profitable by itself: only firms offering both financial news and data tended to survive.

Keywords: news agencies; financial and business news; business information; Arrow's fundamental paradox of information; trading data terminals; exchange rates; stock prices; bond prices; commodity prices; precursors to internet; industrialisation of services; ICT productivity impact; Kenneth J. Arrow; business history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L82 L86 N20 N72 N74 N82 N84 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-fdg, nep-his, nep-ict and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/129938/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:129938

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().