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Bloomberg Professional

This guide is designed to cover the basics of navigating through Bloomberg Professional, and retrieving financial news and information.

Bloomberg Formulas in Excel

Basic

While the Data Wizards are the easiest way to download data to Excel, the Bloomberg Formulas give you more flexibility to create your own data set and its layout. When using any of the formulas, specify these:

  1. Security instrument (e.g. equity, bond, fund, etc.)
  2. Data field, and the field must be represented by its field mnemonic.
  3. To find a particular field name, use FLDS

Basically, there are 3 types of BBG Formulas:

Bloomberg Formulas Example

BDP (Bloomberg Data Point)

  • Contains only one ticker and one data field
  • One static or real time data point only.
Formula Syntax: =BDP("Security", "Field")

To retrieve the price of the last trade of Google Stock:

=BDP("GOOG US EQUITY","PX_LAST")

BDH (Bloomberg Data History)

 

  • Contains only one ticker and one data field
  • One static or real time data point only.

 

Formula Syntax: =BDH("Security", "Field", "Start Date","End Date", "Optional Arguments")

 

To retrieve annual EBIT data for HSBC from 2009 to 2011:

=BDH("5 HK EQUITY","EBIT","01/01/2009", "12/31/2011","PER=CY","CURR=USD")

BDS (Bloomberg Data Set)

 

  • Provides descriptive data
  • One static or real time data point only.
Formula Syntax: =BDS("Security", "Field", "Optional Arguments")

 

To retrieve company (601398 CH) decription:

=BDS("601398 CH EQUITY","DES")

Advanced

The following templates show you how to use Bloomberg formulas to extract data

1. Downloading Time Series Data (e.g. LAST_PRICE) for Multiple Securities (vertical format) (HKUST Only)

  1. Click here to download the template
  2. Open the file on Bloomberg Terminal
  3. There are two worksheets in the template
  4. Select Bloomberg on the toolbar
  5. Then click Refresh Workbooks

 

2. Downloading Time Series Data (e.g. LAST_PRICE) for Multiple Securities (horizontal format)

  1. Click here to download the template (HKUST Only)
  2. Open the file on Bloomberg Terminal
  3. Go to sheet 2. Select Bloomberg on the toolbar
  4. Then click Refresh Workbooks

 

3. Downloading Fundamental Data Using Override Method

  1. Click here to download the template (HKUST Only)
  2. Open the file on Bloomberg Terminal
  3. There are two examples in the template
  4. Select Bloomberg on the toolbar
  5. Then click Refresh Workbooks

 

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