Introduction to Bloomberg  Tags: bloomberg business  

The Historical End of Day wizard lets you pull end-of-day data over a specified time period (An example of a time series data field is stock price).  You can specify the frequency of the data fields to either daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.

Begin by choosing your securities:

1. In Excel select from the toolbar Bloomberg>Import Data
2. Select Historical End of Day
3. In the From box select Equities Indices In this example we will select securities from an equity index.  You can also manually type individual securites, and pull from a list.  See the Bloomberg>Help documentation for more information.
4. In the Indices box select FTSE 100 INDEX
5. Select the following 5 companies and Add them to the Selected securities box: AZN, HOME, LLOY, MKS, ULVR
6. Click Next

Now select your data fields:

1. Type the word "price" into the Search text box to find all data fields that contain the word price
2. Add Px_Last to the Selected fields box
3. Do the same for VWAP Volume and Volume Notice that when you highlight a field, its definition appears in the box below.
4. Click Next

Now select the frequency and time frame for your search:

1. Set the Periodicity to Quarterly
2. Select Fixed Time Series
3. Select the period CQ1 2002 to CQ4 2007
4. Click Next

Now select some preferences regarding the currency and days traded:

1. From the Currency drop-dowm menu select USD (for US dollars)
2. Under Non-trading days select Exclude
3. Click Next

Now finish up by arranging how you want the data to be presented on the spreadsheet

1. Under Time ordering select Reverse chronological
2. Click Finish

Try changing one of the tickers to BARC LN and see what happens.

In Excel, from the top menubar, go to Bloomberg > Help to see the Help documentation for more assistance in using the API.

BU < GO > will take you to Bloomberg University where you can watch online tutorials of how to use the Excel API. NOTE: as of 14 August 2008 the videos show the old interface for the Excel API and may not cover all functionality of the new version.

Use BBXL < GO > in the Bloomberg terminal to find cheatsheets, pre-programmed spreadsheets, demo-spreadsheets, and explanation of error messages.