From 1995 to 1996 I was the Athens correspondent for Dow Jones-Telerate News Service, a leading financial news service, with journalist Paul Anastasi in charge of the Athens bureau. I was paid through Olympic Action Ltd. in Athens, owned by Anastasi.

THIS & THAT

Telerate no longer exists, having been taken over by Reuters in 2005, but in its day, Telerate was a pioneering and forever controversial leader in the distribution of real-time market information.

When the Telerate business was taken over by Dow Jones in 1990, Telerate’s sales were on the way to one billion dollars, but the partying had to end. Dow Jones was a strait-laced organisation and as publisher of the Wall Street Journal, America’s leading business newspaper, was acutely conscious of its vulnerability to the risk of revelations of a potentially embarrassing nature.

Telerate was a global provider of real-time financial market information. The company provided financial services firms with benchmark capital markets content and transaction services to drive investment decisions. The firm had over 35 years experience and was headquartered in New York City.

In April of 1992, Dow Jones restructured its on-line information services, forming Dow Jones Telerate, Inc., and two separate business news services. In the following year, the company moved to update its services by introducing a program that ran on the new Windows personal computer operating system, and by rolling out new TeleTrac financial software. In early 1994, Telerate announced that it would begin to list government bond prices from a major broker for primary dealers called Liberty Brokerage Investment Company. This information, from a company that specialized in short-term bonds, supplemented the company's Cantor figures, which were stronger in the long-term bond field. In addition, the company strengthened its Asian information services.

Telerate provided financial information via computer screens that are used in brokerage houses and elsewhere.