Bloomberg has data on more than 5 million bonds, equities, commodities, currencies, and funds. It covers most every publicly traded company in the world, and has profiles on more than a million people.
Navigation in Bloomberg is via a decentralized, command driven system. Securities are organized by market silos and can be access via drilling down a series of menus or by entering a command. Commands to retrieve information are represented by codes.
Being a decentralized database, there are three things to keep in mind:
With more than 25,000 codes, the key to becoming an expert Bloomberg user is to
Learning how to put a command together in Bloomberg is similar to learning another language. The example below provides the basic structure of a command.
| BMC | Bloomberg Market Concepts 8-hour training course covering 70 functions across equities, fixed income, economics, and currencies | BPS | Bloomberg resource center for quick guides on market sectors and include top functions |
| BI | for industry analysis covering a number of industries such as pharma, energy, financials, etc. | BRIE | Periodic news and updates from Bloomberg on economics, investing, deals, and regulation. |
| MSG | the Bloomberg message system | HDSK | to retrieve Help desk messages |
| TOP | to get news from around the world updated constantly and can be filtered by topic, language, and date | JOBS | to view job listings |
| BTMM | for key rates | WEI | world equity indices lists the benchmark indices by geography |
| EQS | Equity screening | SRCH | Bond Search |
| EVTS | Events calendar | NIM | for new issues |
| LEAG | League tables | BHL | Bloomberg Help and Learning for training on launchpad, Excel API, and specific markets |
| ECO | find upcoming and past economic releases | WECO | for world economic releases |
| GLCO | Global commodity prices & data | FXGN | Foreign exchange rates |
These functions provide a market level view or are not tied to one specific security. Because of this, you do not use a yellow market key with them. For example, WEI <GO> will take you directly to a listing of major indices worldwide.
Take a look at BHL <GO> for Bloomberg Help and Learning to discover the newest functions and guides.
Bloomberg help is available via email. Hit the green < HELP > key twice and a window will open with an option to type in your question and send it to a Bloomberg support specialist.
The news feeds in Bloomberg are one of its most popular features.
TOP < GO > - to get to the top news screen. From here you can specify what kind of news items you want to view.
READ < GO > - to view the most popular news stories on bloomberg.
CN - to view company news. For example JNJ < EQUITY > CN < GO >
Click on the headline to view a story. You can also email or download the stories.
This is a revised and adapted version of the Cornell University Libraries' How to: Bloomberg: Getting Started guide, used with permission.