Over the years, we've become a powerful, and flexible financial and multi-media tool used by more than 300,000 market professionals globally. This video is intended to help you with the basic logic and navigation of the system.
But before we get started, I want to familiarize you with commonly used Bloomberg terminology. When we refer to any screen on Bloomberg, we usually call it a function. All yellow keys on the keyboard are generally referred to by the market sector they correspond to. For example, we call the F8 key, the equity key. And then lastly, the enter key is always referred to as a GO key, as all functions are usually named with the term go following them.
For example, if I wanted to pull up news stories, I would say let's load NGO, or press the green news key. This just means that I would type in N into the command line, followed by enter, or go to load the relevant information.
Now, let's continue with the session. There's thousands of unique analytics and billions of data points available to customers on our system. The questions is, how does Bloomberg organize the data. It's a menu-driven system that is best exemplified by the function MAIN GO, which is currently on our screen. Here you get a glimpse into how data is organized from market sectors to people, Bloomberg, agency, brokerage, other services, trading systems, and customer support.
We're going to focus our efforts today on market sectors, and customer support sections of the platform. But, if you do have any questions or concerns about any of the other Bloomberg offerings, please contact your Bloomberg representatives, which you can find by typing brep into the command line, followed by go.
Now, to truly understand navigation, we need to start with the keyboard, and although it is multi-colored, it is a normal functioning keyboard. When used in concert with Bloomberg Professional Service, it's a very, very powerful guide.
Now, the best analogy to use when thinking about the keyboard, is that of a stop light with red, yellow, and green keys. Now, the red keys, which are found on the upper right-hand and upper left-hand corner of your keyboard are the stop keys. For example, if you want to log in or log out of the system, you'd press the pause break, con default key found on the upper right-hand corner of your keyboard.
Likewise, if you wanted your analysis of a security with a clean state, you'd press the red key in the upper left-hand corner, this key, the cancel key. This key also has another function. That is to provide you of direct access to your account manager or product manager. For example, when I press the escape key, I do have the ability to click on my Bloomberg representatives, which will send a direct message, or I could call him at the number listed on this page.
You'll also see three ways to contact Bloomberg support. The first is a 24/7 help desk to answer any questions you may have. The second option is to request a call from our technical support team, and the third is to see the number for a global customer support lines available 24/7 with over 45 local phone numbers.
You'll also notice a series of yellow keys and green keys on the keyboard. The yellow keys are your market sector keys, and there's 12 of them in total. The F1 key is your log key, the F12 key is your portfolio key, and everything in between represents different asset classes.
So, let's say you're interested in finding treasuries on the Bloomberg, but you weren't sure where to begin. I suggest looking under the F2 government key. If I press government, followed by GO, it's going to load the government menu. I can do the same thing for corporates, followed by go, mortgages with the F4 key, and so forth.
You'll see the first link is going to be our Sec F, our powerful security finder, which allows you to search for a particular security.
Each one of these menus has a very similar feel and functions that are relevant to the market sector, and some menus are organized tools by functions.
Now, this leads to my next point. There's three different ways to navigate the system. You can point-and-click, enter numbers into the command line, or run the mnemonic. Let's look at equities by pressing F8, our equity key, followed by go. So, in this example, we're going to have a look at most active up and down equities, and you'll see that we have a sub-menu, market surveillance.
We have our first option, which is a four-letter code, MOST, which is for our most active securities. We could either click on this menu, or we can go to our command line and type in MOST followed by go to run this function.
Lastly, there's the green keys, which run along the top and the side of your keyboard. These are your action keys. For example, in order to go directly to news stories, or look up the inbox to see messages, you'd select the corresponding green key for that action.
Additionally, there's two keys of particular important to new users and old users alike. These are the menu key and the help key. The menu key, which can be found on the right side of your keyboard, will allow you to navigate between screens. And the help key, found on the upper left corner of the keyboard, does exactly what it says it does, provides users with help.
We're going to start with the help key. Now, there are two primary functions of this key. It can be used as a user guide, and it also gives you the ability to access our help desk. Now, the user guide provides you with basic information on how to use that function.
We currently have the most active securities on screen right now. Let's pretend we didn't really know what we were looking at. When I press a help key one time, it opens a user guide and lists the Table of Contents across the left, the actual content on the right, and in the upper left-hand corner there's an amber box for which you can search for very specifics within the contents itself. Every function on the system has a user guide behind it.
Now, the second way to use our help key is to access our help desk, which provides real-time assistance to users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For instance, if I press help one more time, I'll see it will generate an amber window where I can type in my question. What I would do, is I would type in the question, for instance, where do I find money market rates? And I would click on the submit button.
This would give you direct access to our help desk. It's a great resource when you have a question about functionality, you can't find what you're looking for on the system, or have questions related to the validity of the information provided.
Now that we've covered the keyboard and the basic logic of the system, I'm going to provide you with a couple of tips that will make navigation a lot easier. Now, suppose I want to pull information on a single security such as Google.
Now, the easiest way to do that would be to type a ticker into the command line, followed by the yellow market sector key, in this case, the equity key F8, followed by the green go key. So, goog for Google, followed by the F8 key, equity, followed by go, or enter. When you load the security, you -- provide you with a quote line which displays the different information for the stock. You'll also see across the top left, we have the analyze equity security menu, which corresponds to the underlying menu we see on the screen.
Across the top right, you also see other options on this quote line, including a star to mark our favorites, an export button to take this information out of the terminal, and the ability to add notes, our gear icon for any settings, and the question mark, which is direct link to help on the page.
Additionally, we break down the data into different sub-menus, listing the most commonly used functions on the main page. This will hold true for bonds, commodities, indices, currencies, etc., etc.
Now, let's say you didn't know the ticker of a particular company you are looking for more. The more -- the longer, more elaborate method, would be to type the ticker into the command line and press the help key one time. In this case, we'll type in Google, followed by the help key. This takes you to the Bloomberg internal search engine.
Here, you will find 23 categories from which to choose, and we've also sorted the results on relevancy. You see that all the categories are listed on the left, and the number of results for them in white.
Auto-complete is an incredible search engine on the Bloomberg. You simply start typing and auto-complete displays securities, functions, and a whole lot more. It learns from you, so that the most relevant choices are displayed. And the more you type, and the further it narrows down your choice.
Now, to turn on this tool, the first thing you're going to do is go to the gray toolbar on the upper right corner under the gear icon. We're going to click on that, and we're going to drag our mouse down to the command line, and we're going to drag it over to auto-complete and set it to auto.
Now, this is a great tool for you to find anything on the system. Again, we could look for interest rates, or we could look at all functionality that has to do with interest rates at the top, or we could look at securities that have to do with interest rates at the bottom.
Now, I'm going to end the session today with four broad market franchise applications, four single security tools that you need to know, the message system, as well as where you can find some cheat sheets on the Bloomberg.
The first of the four franchise applications is the top news, or pressing the news key. This will display a headline of today's top stories. These are typically important headlines affecting today's business, selected by our editors, and arranged in order of significance. It's important to note that any of these stories with a white circle with a B indicate that the story is a Bloomberg exclusive story.
The second function I want to talk to you about today is our economic calendar, or ecogo. This allows you to display a customized view, and manage multiple economic calendars. For example, you can view economic releases in the upcoming week with survey and previous months' data with actual data populated at the time of release.
Additionally, on the top left, you can change your country, your date range, and types of releases such as central bank or treasury auctions. So, all these amber fields can be customized. You can use a yellow fields to change your date range. You can use the yellow field to change your calendar type, etc., etc.
Something else to note here is that everything in white means that those numbers are coming out today. And everything in amber moving forward will give you the information for future dates.
The next function I want to talk to you about is the world equity indices, or weigo. This allows you to compare indices against one another, and determine current and historical performance levels. You can use the comparative analysis to determine investment opportunities, and how market changes in global markets may affect the stock in your portfolio. Again, we would pull weigo to pull that up, that functionality.
Lastly, I want to show you how you can find economic statistics on Bloomberg. By typing ecst into the command line, followed by go, it's going to pull up the world economic statistics to display current and historical economic statistics for a selected nation. You can use ecst to finalize trends in economic statistics, using links to historical graph applications, description pages, and news.
Those are four of the most important functions that you will probably use with respect to broad market analysis.
On the single security front, there's four tools you should also be very aware of. We are going to, again, go back to our previous example of Google by typing goog equity. Now, if you want to pull up any of these four securities, we would need to make sure that we have Google loaded across the top as we do on the gray indicator bar.
You can type in des, which is the second option on our menu to view the company description. This will show us an overview of the company, including price, earnings, corporate info, as well as the short descriptive information across the top.
The second tool I want to talk to you about was the effective historical security analysis -- historical pricing. This function would be HP GO. This took will display a table of historical prices, values, along with a summary of high, low, and average prices for a selected security.
The next function I want to bring up to your attention is graphical price, or GP GO. This allows you to graph historical closing prices for a selected security. To do so, you press GP, followed by GO, and this will bring up the graph. You'll notice that we have a series of yellow fields, which can be customized, including the underlying security, the dates, the prices we're looking at, and across the gray tab on the graph, you'll see we can adjust to either one year, year-to-date, five years, or even the maximum amount of information available. We can also change the periodicity from daily to weekly, monthly, and so forth.
The last tool that I want to talk to you about on the single security front is company news. The function is CN, followed by GO. Company news displays a news page, which provides you with relevant news on the single security listed chronologically with the three most significant stories highlighted across the top of the screen. Again, to load this, you would type in CN, followed by GO.
Now, for some tips and tricks. All the aforementioned functions can be found under cheat, that's c h e a t, followed by GO, which is a home page for Bloomberg cheat sheets, which are broken down by asset class, market sector, and user role. We can click on getting started, and we'll get a screen listing the available documents in different languages, which will have the basic functionality listed in the PDF file, which we can print for our records.
Finally, I want to go over the message system. The message system is a powerful tool on Bloomberg, which you can access by pressing the message key on your keyboard. On here, you'll see a list of your incoming message, but you'll also see a yellow field, or you can search for messages, and the red send message key.
Finally, I would like to over the Bloomberg message system, which is a very powerful tool to communicate with other users. We can access our message inbox by pressing the green message key on your keyboard. On here, you'll see your received messages, and you'll also see a yellow field where you can search for different messages. To the right of that, you'll see a red button to send a message. On the tool line, you'll have the option to either type in an email address, or you can search for any Bloomberg user by typing their name, and pressing GO.
Finally, you can go to mgu to customize your message settings. You'll see across the left, you have different categories, and the right, you'll see different options, including a person message greeting and general message settings.
We covered a lot today in a short period of time. You should have a basic understanding of system logic, the keyboard, how to access the help desk, commonly used functions, where to find cheat sheets, and the message system. If you do require additional assistance, please contact your Bloomberg representative, who you can find by typing in BREP, followed by the GO key, or by pressing the help key twice to access our Bloomberg help desk. Thanks again for using Bloomberg.
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