Bloomberg rolls out ‘actionable’ FX news service
Bloomberg’s new FX news service is designed to give fast, ‘actionable’ insight to traders
Bloomberg has launched a new information service called First Word Foreign Exchange, designed to give FX traders ‘actionable’ news insight that they can quickly process and feed into their trading decisions.
The new service offers 24-hour coverage of economic, geopolitical, currency-specific news. The idea is not to provide conventional news stories, but something closer to a series of bullet points that distil the most important information into bite size chunks. The service is staffed by traders, former portfolio managers and other experts.
“This is more than news – this is real time actionable information,” said Tod Van Name, global head of FX, economics and commodities at Bloomberg. “The content is broad – it covers things like central bank intervention, debt levels, oil prices, macroeconomic figures. It will be useful for buy- and sell-side traders and government agencies. The purpose is to be more insightful and more immediate than conventional news.”
The First Word FX team also uses Bloomberg’s integrated social media monitoring platform to keep track of government ministers, agencies, investors, economists and other newsmakers on Twitter and reports on this content, provided the source can be verified. As part of the news gathering process, the team uses social analytics tools to monitor spikes in Twitter activity.
Consumers that want to take social media even further can use the Bloomberg App Portal to access a separate social media sentiment index tool built by French company IoSquare that allows traders to incorporate information from social media sites like twitter into their trading decisions.
Bloomberg plans to expand First Word Foreign Exchange substantially by adding new staff and growing coverage to include the emerging markets, more regions and more currencies.
“The format is not like a newspaper,” said Van Name. “This is about insight, about working out ‘what does it mean’. The information is drawn from key contacts in the FX industry, as well as a broad range of data and analysis. This is for human traders touching the keyboard who need quick, insightful information.”
The FX market averages $5.3 trillion in turnover daily, which is an increase of more than a third since 2011, according to the Bank for International Settlements.
