Lost opportunity

It’s impossible to let David Mulhall’s passing go without recalling that he was the architect of what could have truly been the Bloomberg killer. As recounted in Chapter 3 in the book Barry Simpson and I wrote about the near collapse of Reuters, Breaking News, by 1989 Mulhall had designed a bond product based on a database of prices, including all short-term instruments and US government bonds, that would crucially have allowed users to analyse and compare prices.

“I’d specified a product which I think would have knocked Bloomberg for six. It would have allowed interrogation by country, by year, by quality or rating, with direct links to news directly affecting each market,” Mulhall told us. “Money was put in the budget, but it was used for other things. I think it was seen as a bit of a joke … Sadly it never happened.”

Mulhall was made redundant three months later - “out of the blue,” he said. The study of history is so often the revelation of lost opportunity! ■