Thomson Reuters Eikon is one of the leading financial market data platforms in the world. Next to the famous Bloomberg Terminal, Reuters Eikon gives investors and portfolio managers access to some of the most comprehensive and advanced market data and analytics available.
However, advanced technology isn’t cheap. Starting at $1,900 per month, per user, plus all exchange data fees, is Eikon worth the hefty price-tag? At The Options Bro, we like to think of trading, investing, and any other form of asset risk as a game. To win this “game” having the best equipment certainly cannot hurt, right?
There’s no question that, like the Bloomberg Terminal, Eikon offers functions that are simply not present on most trading platforms.
Key Points
- Thomson Reuters Eikon starts at $1,900/month with a 12 month lease
- Mobile application, desktop version, and web-based browser of Eikon available
- Extremely valuable research reports available for free
Company Overview
Company Overview is a fantastic feature to get pricing and general information about any publicly traded company in the world. Regardless if it’s listed on a stock exchange in Dubai or Argentina, Eikon provides all of the information you need to know on one simple page. From this homepage, you can see detailed financials, options quotes, estimates, forecasts, recent filings and so much more.
Short Interest
Eikon shows short interest simply and accurately. We use short interest all the time when looking at a stock to short. Often times, if the short interest is high, and there is a significant risk of a short squeeze, we will look to synthetically short the stock by using bearish options strategies.
Lawsuits
This is one of our absolute favorite features. Eikon aggregates all current and pending litigation and allows users to filter by sector, case type (i.e. civil, tort, etc.) and even by specific companies. This screenshot shows all of the litigation against Google (Alphabet Inc.) since the beginning of the year. This is a very valuable feature to gain insight into a company by reading what patrons and users of companies are alleging the company did wrong.
Eikon Polls
We’ve scoured Bloomberg and other data providers and haven’t found anything that compares to Eikon’s Polls feature. Remember, over 300,000 of the world’s most successful and important money managers and investors use Eikon. This is important because knowing what and where other market participants are invested is invaluable knowledge. Eikon Polls gives you insight into exactly that. You can see if money managers are invested mostly in US equities, Japanese equities, or anywhere in Europe. It’s a phenomenal tool.
Commidity Breakdown
Another thing we love about Eikon is how it provides data for an entire sector initially, and then lets you look at a specific asset, like crude oil in the energy industry. In the screenshot below, we’re in the Energy App, and we’re looking at oil. The map on the right shows the current outages in the Foties oil pipeline due to a hairline crack that forced the the pipeline to close. News of the closure sent oil prices skyrocketing. Eikon lets you track the status of oil pipeline outages and repairs all while giving you real-time prices for Brent Crude, Light Sweet, and Oman Crude. It’s slick and powerful.
Stock Sentiment
One of the more interesting features of Eikon, Stock Sentiment pulls data from various social media platforms to gauge the overall sentiment for a specific stock. Interestingly, stock sentiment shows tweets and posts from StockTwits. This means professional traders, institutional money managers, and anyone else who uses Eikon can see what retail traders post on StockTwits – pretty interesting. We are looking at the sentiment for Apple Inc. in the screenshot below. At the time this screenshot was taken, Apple recently fell almost 4% intraday due to a report regarding potentially weak iPhone X demand. We like looking at sentiment before we make an investment.
Shareholder Ownership
This nifty app lets Eikon users see precisely who owns a specific stock down to the number of shares. Of course, Reuters gathers this data from the SEC but it’s convenient to have all of the data in one place. Although most of the stocks in the United States are owned by institutions, sometimes it’s helpful to look at stock ownership and insider transactions before making an investment.
Final Thoughts
If cost is no object, $2k to be connected to all of the markets in the world and access all the data you could imagine from one central place is priceless. However, if we had to choose between Eikon and Bloomberg Terminal, we would probably go with the Terminal.
