Bloomberg
Bloomberg
Bloomberg
Bloomberg Core
1.
2.
Getting Started
Bloomberg News
3.
4.
2.
1.
2.
Equity Essentials
Fixed Income Essentials
3.
4.
the Subotnick Center with their campus ID, log in to a Bloomberg terminal and go through
BESS training for free.
To get started with the BESS training, you should first create your own Bloomberg login.
Bloomberg tracks your progress and exam scores using your unique login. A brief
tutorial on creating a Bloomberg login can be foundhere.
You may also wish to have a set of headphones or ear buds handy for listening to the
Bloomberg videos without distracting others around you. The Bloomberg keyboard has a
headphone jack that (if configured properly) should allow you to listen to the videos in
privacy.
As you are reviewing a tutorial, open up an additional Bloomberg window and type in the
commands as they are described. You may also wish to do more exploration of a particular
function or review examples again if you did not understand it the first time. Once you have
completed the tutorial, challenge yourself to run through all of the commands just
introduced and then practice them to make sure they stay fresh in your memory.
As you can see from the BESS screen, the tutorials for each of the modules can be
launched by clicking on their titles. Along the bottom of the screen there are links to view
and take exams, as well as a link to request the Acknowledgement of Completion.
On the following pages, each of the tutorials is introduced along with some pointers for
getting most out of your studying time.
The video tutorial begins with a high level overview of Bloombergs menu based navigation
system starting with the MAIN <GO> menu function. This function shows how Bloombergs
data and screens are organized into market sectors, trading systems, customization and
settings tools, Bloomberg Law and Government and Help and Support.
The next section of the tutorial introduces the Bloomberg keyboard. The keys are color
coded according to their purpose such as:
Red Keys are used to log into the system (the Red DFLT key) and to cancel a
navigation keys on the right for Page Up, Page Down, End, Menu, etc. and the Green Help,
Search, News, etc. keys along the top of the keyboard.
Yellow keys are the market sector keys. Each one helps in identifying financial
instruments or market sectors. These yellow market sector keys include Govt (for
Government debt), CORP (for Corporate debt), MTGE for Mortgages, M-MKT for Money
markets, MUNI for Municipal securities, PFD for preferred, EQUITY for equities, CMDT for
Commodities, INDEX for indexes, CRNCY for currencies (foreign exchange) and finally
CLIENT for portfolio management functions.
Another way to obtain interactive help is to press the HELP key two times. This will open up
a chat session with the Bloomberg help desk if the Live Chat help feature is enabled on
your terminal. Type in any question you might have and a Bloomberg help desk
representative will walk you through any functions or screens to answer your question.
The third way to obtain help is to press HELP key after typing in the name or ticker symbol
of a financial instrument (or any word for that matter). The result will be a list of different
search categories matching your query. For example, typing in BOB EVANS
<HELP> provides the search results that follow. Note Bloomberg found results in categories
such as Companies, People, News, Law, Equities and Fixed Income.:
Company Description
The company description screen provides an overview of the company including its
industry, current and historical price chart and data, recent searching and dividend data and
other summary information. There are a total of 4 screens (press PG DOWN for additional
screen). For example, assuming the target company is IBM, the command would be: IBM
<EQUITY> DES <GO>
For example given the above CHEAT screen, click on the link 1) Getting Started to
view the Getting Started cheat sheets as shown below:
Clicking again on the 1) Getting Started link will display the actual cheat sheet for
getting started. Various language versions are presented. Click on the link for the desired
language and the two page PDF will be downloaded and open in Adobe Acrobat.
Messages are listed in the inbox click on a message to view its contents. There is a
yellow text box used to search for messages and buttons to create new messages, etc.
The default top news screen shows top news world wide. There are a set of Topic heading
along the left side in the gray colored sidebar. Clicking on any one of those topics narrows
the news search down.
Clicking on any news headline will bring up the full news article.
Once the news story is displayed, it can be printed, bookmarked by clicking on the star icon
(or option 91)), or forwarded to a colleague using the Send Story feature. These are
shown in the upper right corner of the screen. If the news story has an attachment it will be
available under the 97) selection. In this example there is a chart attached to the story.
The search field is in the upper left corner and allows you to search for keywords within the
story.
Note that this story has 3 pages. By scrolling to the end of the story you can view a section
of Related News and Information in addition to the authors contact information.
Data Navigation Download data for a single security from a set of categories
on different criteria.
Financials / Estimates Provides the means to retrieve historical balance sheet
Pay particular attention to differences between end-of-day data (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)
and intra-day data (tick, 1-minute, 1-hour etc.) and which types of data
can be retrieved with a given wizard or function.
Other features described in the video are the Template Library which is a collection of predesigned spreadsheets that can be further customized.
Below is a picture of the Bloomberg Ribbon bar running in Microsoft Excel 2010.
After navigating from Company Summary to Overview, the resulting data can be dropped
into Excel using the Drag to Excel button as shown below:
populate the spreadsheet with rows of historical data. The icon and drop down menus for
the Import Data function are shown below:
For example, the Real-Time/Current wizard prompts for a security (AAPL in this example)
and then a set of fields (PX_LAST for last price, PX_BID for Bid Price and PX_ASK for Ask
price were selected). the result is a set of three Bloomberg BDP functions (Bloomberg Data
Point functions) that pull the data from the Bloomberg network into Excel as shown below
(note the formula in cell B2):
In the next pages I will provide some tips on taking the exams.
Usually the first exam to be taken will be the Core Essentials exam with Mnemonic
COREESS. When you are ready to take the exam click on this link and the exam will
launch.
Below is an example question and answer format (the actual question and answers have
been obscured). Answering a question is a two step process: First click on your answer
choices, and then click on the red Submit button at the bottom of the screen. You cannot
proceed to the next question until the current question is submitted. Note also that the
entire exams answers are not checked until the last question is submitted.
Continue answering questions and Submitting answers until you reach the last (30 th)
question.
Bloomberg University
Bloomberg University is a collection of help and documentation guides along with
schedules and sign-up sheets for Bloomberg training events. To access Bloomberg
University use the code BU to bring up the screen:
Of particular interest to new Bloomberg users are the various Cheat Sheets one or two
page documents that provide quick access to many of the different Bloomberg functions.
TO get started viewing Cheat sheets, use the code CHEAT to bring up the screen:
For example given the above CHEAT screen, click on the link 1) Getting Started to
view the Getting Started cheat sheets as shown below:
Clicking again on the 1) Getting Started link will display the actual cheat sheet for
getting started. Various language versions are presented. Click on the link for the desired
language and the two page PDF will be downloaded and open in Adobe Acrobat.
Conclusions
In this series of posts I have covered a very basic introduction to Bloomberg including
creating your own Bloomberg account and going through the Bloomberg Essentials
training.