Skip to Main Content

Bloomberg Professional

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

Basic

Please make sure you have the Bloomberg Excel Add-In installed before trying out the following Bloomberg formulas and templates. (Installation Steps)

While the Spreadsheet Builder are the easiest way to download Bloomberg 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 last price of Alphabet Inc:

=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 parameters])

To retrieve closing prices for HSBC from 2020 to 2021:

=BDH("5 HK EQUITY","PX_LAST","01/01/2020","12/31/2021")

BDS (Bloomberg Data Set)

  • Provides descriptive data
  • One static or real time data point only
Formula Syntax: =BDS("Security", "Field", [optional parameters])

To retrieve company's (601398 CH) description:

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

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. Make sure you have installed the Bloomberg Excel Add-In
  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. Make sure you have installed the Bloomberg Excel Add-In
  4. Go to sheet 2. Select Bloomberg on the toolbar
  5. 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. Make sure you have installed the Bloomberg Excel Add-In
  4. Select Bloomberg on the toolbar
  5. Then click Refresh Workbooks

 

© HKUST Library, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. All Rights Reserved.