Bloomberg Terminal vs. Factiva

Depending on which area of the finance sector you may work in, the Bloomberg Terminal will have plenty of helpful functionality for you. Two specific scenarios for myself in the Structured Finance area are tracking the pricing benchmark and following outstanding deals in the market. You can follow progress of the deals, how well they are advancing, and final pricing details

Incentivized

Factiva is particularly useful when I work on securities litigations involving shareholder lawsuits -- i.e. shareholders who bought and sold shares during a specified class period when the company was misrepresenting, for example, its financials. Specifically Factiva is quite useful in helping me understand what company events were known by the market and when they were known. Factiva has also been useful in helping me on various research studies. It is less relevant for other types of litigation that I work on (i.e. Patent litigation, etc).

Incentivized

• Communicating with investors, banks, partners, etc
• Tracking key market metrics
• Monitoring existing and previous structured finance deals

Incentivized

• Putting broad swaths of news in one place
• Organizing information
• Constant updates

Incentivized

• Visual user interface
• A lot of functionality, need tutorials and lessons to narrow down
• Expensive!
• Some information may be delayed

Incentivized

• Lengthy setup for searches
• Repeated articles appear frequently
• Unannounced interface changes were unpleasant surprises

Incentivized

While there are a lot of competitive services in the marketplace, each good in its own right, the Bloomberg Terminal is considered the top product. It has key fast information and can help individuals make fast decisions. It also has a top-tier support desk that can answer questions for you and teach you functionality to apply to your role

Incentivized

Each of the tools I have described share the same kind of premise: the main thing they do is source and collect media content. Then to varying degrees they run filters against this content and produce a range of data visualisations and ways of slicing the data and content. Factiva's strength lies more in the sourcing of content than in the manipulation of the results (much like the others do with more sophisticated dashboards and visual interpretations). We chose it because of the integrity of its sourcing breadth. It doesn't matter so much about the display of results because the source material you're working with isn't as dynamic as say social media.

Incentivized

• Appropriate pricing of deals due to market comparisons
• Instant communication with key stakeholders
• Top and quick newsbreaks

Incentivized