Bloomberg releases Citigroup earnings early

Bryce Elder of The Financial Times reports that Bloomberg News released details of Citigroup’s third-quarter earnings before the embargo was lifted.

Elder writes, “It would appear one of the headline editors in Bloomberg’s New Jersey outpost had Citi’s results on embargo and pressed the ‘publish’ button accidentally. That forced Citi to pull forward a statement scheduled for 8am EST.

“Still. No harm done, right? It’s not as if Citi shares were trading at the time.

“Except they were, on Tradegate and Chi-X. And on the local markets in Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart. And in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and Hannover.

“Bloomberg has been trying to regain Wall Street’s trust that it can handle sensitive data (or at least deter its reporters from mining its customers’ information for potential stories). Unilaterally pre-releasing earnings on behalf of America’s third-biggest bank can’t really help that cause.”

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