Telerate

Telerate was a US company providing financial data to market participants, specialising in commercial paper and bond prices.

With its main innovation being to extend the technology that was used to obtain live stock prices, via Telequote, Quotron or Stockmaster to other sectors of the financial industry, such as corporate debt, currencies, interest rates and commodities.

However, the success and new wealth allowed Neil Hirsch to indulge in what was described by Telerate insider John Jessop "as a hedonistic lifestyle that involved drugs and alcohol in quantities that some observers saw as life-threatening".

Cantor Fitzgerald decided to sell its 89% stake, and it was sold to British investment group Exco International for $75 million.

The company's main competitor Reuters grew in popularity, which saw a collapse in the Telerate share price in the autumn of 1984.

The Dow Jones board had urged the sale despite taking a significant loss due what it perceived as insurmountable competition from its two biggest rivals, Reuters and Bloomberg, particularly as Telerate lacked the more complex historical pricing information and other analytical software that investors were looking for.

As part of the deal, MoneyLine reached an agreement with Reuters for the collection and aggregation of market data and other services for a three to four year transition period.

[7] The business continued to decline, and by 2005 the company was no longer publicly traded and was now majority owned by One Equity Partners, the domestic venture capital arm of JPMorgan Chase.

In June of that year, One Equity Partners sold the remains of the Moneyline Telerate business to Reuters for approximately $175 million.