Evaluation of information service providers in support of the fixed-income market

The objective of this chapter is to evaluate three different information systems (IS). These IS, considered global information service providers to (Fixed Income) FI-Market actors, are: Bloomberg, Reuters, and Action Economics. The question raised in this chapter is: How valuable are these three systems to FI-Market actors? Montazemi, Esfahanipour and Siam compare and contrast the functionality of each system to highlight their advantages/disadvantages towards usage. While both private and public information are critical to profitable trade in FI markets, the question arises as to the significance of different information sources in support of different stages of FI actors ’ decision-making processes (i.e. information categories). The aim is to investigate the value of information sources to actors in the FI market for pre-trade that may lead to an execution of trade and post-trade to assess the quality of their previous transactions. Montazemi, Esfahanipour and Siam examine the FI information providers based on a human computer interaction (HCI) framework to understand the way people interact with computers in terms of the processes they engage in, resources they use, and tasks they intend to accomplish. The framework identifies four levels of interaction within the context of FI information providers namely; tasks level, semantic level, syntax level and lexical level. The findings show that the platform that seemed to serve on FI trader best was Bloomberg followed by Reuters and then Action Economics. Reuters and Bloomberg provide the essential information that FI traders require for their daily involvement in the markets. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the three platforms in support of the above assessment.