Well its been a year since they released this product.. are there any users out there? Have they cleaned up their act? All I've heard is its better then bloomberg when it comes to commodity focused trading.
although i don't use it from what i've read/heard it's inferior to bbg and the costs can really add up. w/ bbg you pay one (albeit high) monthly fee that covers everything you will ever need but w/ reuters you have a base fee then you have to add in every package you want which makes it just as expensive as bloomberg (yes i know you have to pay some data fees w/ bbg but these fees are nominal compared to the reuters addons). my advice - stick to bbg. it's the industry standard for a reason. if it's a decision b/w one or the other it's no decision at all. if you're at a bank/hf and don't have a choice then that's another matter.
Bloomberg is the shit, and they get $1800 per month with a three year contract for a reason. If they went month-to-month, they would triple their business. Reuters has a reputation for a reason.
I've used both Reuters and Bloomberg terminals at my desk since '02 Reuters latest update from the 3000 extra has had its name changed to Ei kon http://thomsonreuterse****.com/ (elite blanks the word E i k o n no idea why) Reuters is better and quicker for European markets but less Americans use it, often some news will hit the reuters terminal first then be shown on bloomberg a few minutes or even hours later giving a second wave move. Bloomberg tends to be faster on US data releases but slow on others, both have about the same number of screw ups reporting wrong releases and both have fairly poor support, Bloomberg help chat is a joke, I must have files and files of open ended queries where they promise to get back to me and never do, they seem terrified to do any queries by phone. A bloomberg employee told me to never to bother asking the chat help people anything -brilliant. They both have pros and cons. Bloomberg are militant on enforcing insane contracts Reuters seem more human but I'd keep both
i believe they have 2 year contract. the reason they don't (and prob won't) go to month to month is obvious - stability and predictability of revs.
They'd gain very few quality customers by offering month to month. They'd pick up low-rent, room-over-the-garage, penny-pinching, milk-the-API, ping-helphelp-all-day types who are more trouble than they're worth. BBG wants to sell terminals by the hundreds to big banks, not one by one, month to month, to basement-dwellers.
' not one by one, month to month, to basement-dwellers." that still leaves quite a yahoo finance chat and ET posters who live in trailer parks.
+1. for the vast majority of independent traders (and all superstar paper traders) a bbg is overkill. i've never heard of a single trader using more than 10% of bbg's functionality. if you're trading off technicals like most of us i suspect just get the following and be done w/ it: a really good data feed, a really good charting program, and ummm that's it