Technology
The information asymmetry between institutional and individual investors is a structural feature of financial markets. New platforms are beginning to erode it.
NewsOnScale Staff
May 20, 2026
Bloomberg Terminal costs approximately $24,000 per year. Reuters Eikon costs $22,000. For fifty years, the data that professional traders use to make investment decisions has been priced for institutions, not individuals.
The justification was infrastructure cost. Aggregating and delivering real-time market data from hundreds of exchanges required significant physical infrastructure. The price reflected genuine costs.
Cloud infrastructure and AI data processing have dramatically reduced those costs. The justification for $24,000 annual pricing is weaker now than at any point in the history of financial data.
## The information asymmetry problem
Information asymmetry in financial markets is real and extensively documented. Institutional investors have access to data, tools, and research that individual investors do not. They see market-moving information faster, process it with better tools, and act on it before retail participants can respond.
## What new platforms are doing
A generation of financial data platforms is attempting to address this asymmetry by delivering institutional-quality data at price points accessible to individual investors. ParseTicker delivers real-time market intelligence starting at $8 per month. The underlying data quality is comparable to institutional terminals. The price point is fundamentally different.