Welcome to the Launchpad session of the Bloomberg Essential Online Training Program. My name is Adriana Gill, and I’m here today to walk you through understanding the Bloomberg Launchpad application. Launchpad is a customizable window-esque interface that allows you to quickly and easily access the information you need most. In this session, we will cover the basics of the Launchpad application, how to build a monitor, news searches, add charts, as well as some tips and tricks.
What you are seeing now is a Launchpad view created for an equity sales trader. By the end of the session, you will have all the tools available to replicate this view. When you first log in to Bloomberg, the application should get set up and launch automatically. If it doesn’t, you can always type into one of the panels BLP, followed by the enter key to launch the application.
The Launchpad toolbar is the mainframe or brains behind the application. What you will see along the top are five tabs. This is the main tools that you’re going to be using in order to navigate through the application itself. If you do not see these five tabs, you can click on the options button in the top right, which will toggle these on and off.
What we’re first going to do is walk through each of the tabs so you’re familiar with everything that falls under each category. What I’d like to remind you first is we are creating a Launchpad view. A view consists of any kinds of functions and charts and monitors that we will go over that you’ll have on your wallpaper. If you make any changes to this view, the first thing that you will like to do is save view so that all customizable features stick.
Next to the views tab, you’ll notice the pages tab. The pages tab will be helpful in order to create additional pages for your view. You’ll also be able to rename, send, and share these pages. Under settings, you’ll be able to decide which Launchpad view you would like to default to open. Note that you can have multiple Launchpad views. If you click on default view to load, another box will pop up on the screen. This will allow you to select which view you’d want to actually open when logging in at the terminal.
Down here you can decide whether you’d like to see this view linked on your bio or profile, as well as having it automatically start up. You can click save to save these changes, or close. Under tools, you’ll be able to see a bunch of the managers that we will be talking about later on in this tutorial. And under help, you’ll be able to see where you can locate help pages for more of an overview on the Launchpad.
Underneath these tabs at the top, what you’ll notice is an amber box and a browse function. This is where you will be able to add the components to your view. If you’re familiar with a component you’d like to add, you can click on enter keywords and simply start typing a keyword. You’ll notice that our auto complete functionality will match this keyword and show you other options that you can select from.
If you’re not familiar with what components you can add, this is where the browse button comes into play. You can click on browse and another pop-up will come on screen. On the left hand side, you’ll notice categories. The middle, you’ll actually see the components And on the right hand side, once you select a component you will see a preview. By default, this populates showing the top 25 most popular components.
The components in the center will also have stars that show you the popularity. If you click on monitor, for instance, this will show you an example of what the monitor will look like, a brief description, and it will also show you that you can launch the component. Note that if you do not want to use the browse functionality, you can click on enter keywords and enter a search word here that you can search for. Let’s go ahead and launch this monitor so that we can work from there.
You’ll notice that a black box pops up with a gray outline in the background. Let’s close out of this pop-up. The monitor, also known as a watch list, is a great place to get started in order to add your securities that you’re interested in. You’ll notice that there are several tabs at the top of this component, which we will go into as well.
The first thing that I want to review is being able to add securities to this monitor. One of the first ways that you can add securities is by double clicking in this black box. You’ll notice that it will turn amber, and you can go ahead and use the same auto complete functionality that we mentioned before to load a ticker.
Another way to add a security, such as an index, can also be done using the auto complete functionality. If you would like to add the members to this index into the monitor itself, you can right click and you’ll notice a menu pop up. From here, add members will be available. If you click on this, you’ll notice that it will add all of the members of the index into your monitor so that you can see them. At the top, I’m going to go ahead and delete Apple so that we can just concentrate on the INDU itself. If you right click, you will also notice that here will be an option to delete the row, and it’ll delete the security from this list.
Another way for you to add securities to your monitor is using the push-pin icon on the top right of your launch pad functions that you may use on a daily basis. If we go ahead and bring up one of our panels, what we can do here is go ahead and load the index itself and run MEMB for the members page, for example. In the top right, you’ll notice this push-pin icon. If we just move the screen over, what we can do is take this icon and drag it straight into our monitor. This will pop up an option for us to amend securities or replace all. Amend securities is basically essentially adding this to the bottom of the list. Replace all will go ahead and replace the INDU members with that of the S&P.
Another way that we can go ahead and add members to the monitor is by under the monitor menu. If you click on monitor, you’ll see an option to import securities. Clicking on import securities will pop up another box and allow you to select your source. Here you can import securities from another monitor, or, for instance, use the equity index that we had before. Clicking on equity index will allow you to select the index of choice, and then again the same options will populate where you can replace all rows. If we replace all rows, we can click on import and this will show you all of the members of that index.
Now that we’ve discussed how to add securities to the monitor, let’s go more in depth into what the monitor tabs have to offer. Under here, we have discuss how to important securities. Please note that you can also rename your monitor from under here. Another important feature of this menu would be the advanced settings. If you click advanced settings, you’ll see another box pop up allowing you to further customize what your monitor looks like.
A great feature of this is our news – our news minder. If you click on news minder, you’ll notice two option: news style and legacy. Legacy will allow all the tickers in your monitor to highlight a specific color if there’s news available on it. News style is what I have selected currently. And what you’ll notice is on the top of the monitor is a column that indicates how popular news is for that specific security. This will also allow for other customizable options, such as changing your grid lines or your font style.
In addition to the monitor drop down, we also have a view drop down. A great thing to note about the view drop down is this group-by feature. Notice that it’s no grouping currently because it just has the members of the index listed. If we selected something like, sector, for example, you’ll now notice that all of the securities within the monitor are grouped by their appropriate sector. We can go back into view and remove this by just unclicking and unchecking sector.
Under review, there’s also the options to have summary statistics. If you click this option, you have the ability to add an additional line to your monitor showing one of these statistics. For example, if we check off average and click on update, you’ll now notice that an average line appears at the top. This would be an average price for all of the securities listed in this monitor.
Continuing under the view tab, you will also find the option to change the number of panes. Panes is ideally how many columns show on your monitor, breaking it down into categories. We have one single pane. Everything is under one column. If we click on two panes, for example, you’ll now notice that everything is broken down into two columns on the monitor.
Another key feature to keep in mind under the view menu is the manage columns. If you click on manage columns, you’ll notice on the right hand side all the columns that currently appear in your monitor. What you can do is add columns via the left hand side of the screen. If you know what column that you want to add, you can search it by keywords or by categories listed here.
Let’s go ahead and add the full name of the securities listed. If you type name into here, you’ll notice that several categories come up. You can click on name, and you’ll notice at the bottom portion of the screen there’s a description of it that you can scroll through to make sure it’s the right field that you’re adding to your columns. Please keep in mind that across all pop-up menus, usually when you click on a line item you will see a description featured to let you know what you are clicking on.
If we double click, you’ll now notice that it appears on the right hand side of the screen. If you right click on any of these line items, you’ll be able to remove them from the list. Please also keep in mind that you can drag and drop these around to your appropriate order to make sure that you’re seeing the most important information first.
If we go ahead and click on update, you’ll now notice that there are still two panes and it’s now reordered the columns, including the ones that we want to see. On the bottom portion of the screen, since we have it in two panes, we can go ahead and scroll over to see the rest of the columns. Just to make it easier on the eyes for right now, we’re going to go ahead and change the views and the panes back to a single pane.
We can also customize the columns straight in the monitor itself without going into manage columns. For instance, if we wanted the name to follow the ticker symbol, we can click on this column and we can drag it to where we want it to go. Just click, drag, and drop to insert where it’s needed. We can also right click on a column to delete it completely or change what column is showing there.
You can go ahead and click on insert column from the menu that pops up from the right click to see a blank menu appears. For example, if we wanted to add back in the bid price, we can type bid in the auto complete functionality and select it from the drop-down menu. If we wanted this column to appear at the end of our row, again we can click, drag and drop.
Keep in mind that you can also right click to delete columns. For instance, if we didn’t want to see the change on day both in percent and in net form, we can right click and we can delete the column. These will also allow you to resize the columns by right clicking and dragging over. If you double click, it’ll resize depending on what material is being listed in that column.
The next thing that I want to go over is the ability to add alerts. If we right click – if we regular click on the alerts tab, what we’ll notice here is the ability to enable monitor alerts or disable it. Checking this off will add that first column to your monitor. If you uncheck this, note that the column will disappear. This informs you that you will have any kind of custom alerts that you’ve set for your monitor.
When you click on alerts, you’ll also notice the ability to create the new alert for the monitor right here. You can click on it and select what security or all securities in the monitor that you want the alert to be set on. If we leave it at all securities, we can go ahead and add a parameter listed below. The first drop down will list the columns that you have in your monitor. For instance, price. We can go ahead and set up an argument and type a value in here so that for any of the prices that exceed, for example, the average line that we listed earlier on the chart, will get an alert.
Let’s go ahead and for rounding purposes leave it at 74. If you press enter, the value will stick and you can click on create. Note that once you click on create, on the left hand side of the monitor you’ll notice triangles. These purple triangles indicate that the alert has actually been hit, whereas if you see just the regular – the regular exclamation point, this will show that there is an alert hit on the security, but it hasn’t actually registered yet. This will be confirmed by the highlighting in the column that you have set the alert on.
The next thing that I want to bring to your attention is the news menu. Under news, you’ll have the ability to check off show news alerts and news heat (ph). This also deals with the second column at the very beginning of your monitor. If you uncheck this, note that it will disappear, and if recheck this, it’ll come back. These news items here, if you hover over them, will tell you exactly what they represent. White indicates new news, yellow indicates recent news, and gray indicates no news or read news. If you click on this line item, it will go ahead and pop up in panel with the news associated with that ticker.
Under the news menu, you’ll also have the ability to view news on all securities at one time by clicking on this, which will also register in panel. Lastly, you’ll find a link to column here. The link to column has two – several options, but two that I want to highlight. One, under the intraday market map. If you click on this, it will pop up another component, similar to the one that you’ve noticed in the first view that was shown during this tutorial. This will show you a breakdown intraday of all the securities in your monitor and how they are currently performing.
Also under the link to menu, you’ll have the ability to click on component groups. This is the next thing that I would like to review now. With the intraday market map, notice that it says Launchpad as a source here. And in the second amber box, you’ll see that it says monitor 221. Monitor 221 is at the top of our monitor that we just created so that you can see that it’s linked together. Also link to, you’ll have the ability to click on component groups. This is something that we’ll revisit once we’re linking our components together .
I’m going to click and drag and drop to rearrange this. You can notice that you can do this with all components. Once you click, you might notice that a yellow box appears bordering between two different components. This lets you know that they’re linked together, and on the left hand side you’re going to see four-way arrows. If you click on any of the four-way arrows and drag, all components will move together.
The next thing that I want to show is the ability to add a chart to your view. You can go ahead and click on where it says enter keywords and type in chart. From the bottom portion, again using our auto complete functionality, you will see matching components. If you click your enter key, it’ll load the first component that appears on screen.
We’re going to go ahead and drag this over to the right hand side so that we can see everything at one time. The charts will automatically default to showing the INDU index. A breakdown of the chart will show you the actions and the edit tabs at the top. Underneath will be the option to change the periodicity of the chart. Notice that the one year is highlighted in blue, indicating that it is currently set to one year on a daily basis.
To the right hand side, you’re going to see additional tabs or icons. If you click this option to open, you’ll see where you can go ahead and add additional securities by clicking on this drop down, or studies to the chart. The following tabs is for events so that you can see events that you can add to the chart with flags, or click on add event to add events that aren’t listed here.
The next icon will show you any kind of annotations that you have created on the security before and the ability to toggle them on and off the chart. And the last wheel icon that you’ll will show other customizable options for your graph. If you click again on these two arrows, it’s going to hide this panel. It’ll bring you back to your chart.
What we’d like to do next is link this chart to the monitor. This will allow you to click on one of your tickets listed in your monitor and have it automatically populate on your chart. The first thing to do is click on this link icon that appears in the top center of your chart. Once you click this, your group manager will pop up. Since we haven’t created a group yet, you’ll notice that group A – group 1 and the A icon will appear to the left hand side, indicating that it’s the first group that we are creating.
On the right hand side, you’ll notice what group – what components are being included in that group. In addition to the name being listed here, you will notice that the – that the component itself is outlined in red. We can go ahead and click on here to rename this group if we’d like by clicking on the rename icon. You’ll have to save your view in order for this link to save. Once you click okay, you’ll notice that that A icon will now appear in the top center of your chart. In order to link the components to your monitor, please note that it’s a little bit different than the procedure that we just followed.
You will not need to click on the link icon featured in the top center of your monitor. Instead, we’re going to now revisit the link to option component groups that we had mentioned earlier. Once you click on component groups, you’ll notice that group 1 is listed here. If you click this, it’ll check off and have the option to update this. Once you click update, everything’s been saved. You can now click on one of the securities in your panel and the chart will update.
Now that we went ahead and linked our chart monitor, let’s go ahead and add news to this monitor – to this Launchpad view. In the top left, let’s click on enter keywords again and type in news. We’ll click on news on Bloomberg for this example. You’ll notice that the component launches, and we’re going to go ahead and resize this component so that we can fit it on the screen.
Once we’ve resized it, we can go ahead and drag it straight into our spot. Notice again that the yellow outline continues to highlight the components that are now linked, and that icon to move everything together will appear on screen. The top portion of the news will have actions and settings. It’ll have these tabs similar to the other components that we’ve reviewed. Under settings, notice that there is the option to hide your sidebar. You can go ahead and just see news headlines this way. To bring back the option to customize your news, you can show your sidebar to see other options.
Currently, we are looking at top news. This is equivalent to TOPgo N (ph) panel. You’ll see that this is highlighted in blue, and we’ll have the ability to toggle between popular news, which allow you more features to filter your news by, as well as all news. If you’re interested in seeing just news specific to your security list, what we can do is now select securities on the left hand side. Once we click on securities, ticker lists will pop up. These are actually your monitors that we have created, and will pull in monitors that you have. Since we do not see monitor 221 listed, let’s click on customize to see more options.
Customize on this side will show you the top three that are listed in that column, and on the right hand side will show you other ones that you can add. Since we have monitor 221 that we’re interested in, we can click on the plus to add it to the left hand side. And notice that it’s also added to this column for quick and easy access. If you’d like to delete one of these monitors from showing, you can click on the X to delete it from this section, as well as the column on the left hand side. You’ll have other tabs on the top here to further customize your news experience.
If we now go ahead and click on monitor 221, you’ll notice that there’s news headlines filtered by the securities that appear in your list. Currently, it will also show the changes on day, percent and net, as well as the last price for a quick and easy look. You’ll notice that in this news component that MU is showing at the top, not in alphabetical order according to the monitor that we have listed here. The ability to change this is listed to the right side of this component under this magnifying glass.
Once we click on the ability to filter, you’ll now see that there’s another additional line item at the top of your component with amber drop downs to allow for further customizability. On the right hand side you’ll see sort by, with the ability to select the way you want to sort. Currently, it’s set to biggest change, but you can select any of the line items featured here.
We do have other news components that we can add to the view. In exchange for this one, we have a component that you can use that you can group into a component group similar to the chart that we had here that will load with specific news to the ticker that you click on in your monitor. I’m going to go ahead and X out of this component to delete it from our view and show the other one now.
If you go up to enter keywords and type in news, we can now select the news research panel. Two boxes will pop up. The first box that you’re going to notice is the ability to customize your news panel. There are several options that you can select from. There is suggested filters that you can use and toggle down this drop down menu. You can load a custom filter that you’ve created from the NLRT function in panel, or you can click on filter to news on. Let’s click on filter to news on.
There’s two different options that you can select from here. If you select monitor or ticker list, what will happen is all news on all securities that are featured in your monitor will appear in your panel, just like on the news function that we had seen before. Otherwise, if you select on companies, what we can do is create the ability to click on one ticker at a time from your monitor and see news specific just to that ticker. There’s also the option to click on unfiltered news, which I left out before.
If we go ahead and click on companies, what I’d like to do is just add one of the companies for now that is featured in our monitor. Let’s go ahead and add Apple. Once we select Apple, you’ll notice that it’ll tell you that it’s filtering based on company and the name of the company for now. We’ll go ahead at the bottom and click run. Let’s relocate our panel to the bottom portion of the screen, and you’ll see that company and Apple are located on this filter.
What we now want to do is link this to the same A component group that you had before on your chart. We can click on the same link to icon at the top center of your component, and you’ll now notice that the box on screen will allow you to add to that same list. If you click on group 1, you’ll see that both of the components are highlighted in red, and they’ll both appear on the right hand side of the screen. Let’s click update. You’ll also notice that the A appears at the center.
Once we go ahead and click on any of the tickers in our monitor, you’ll see that both the panel and the chart update to that security. Now that we have the components that we want to see on screen, let’s go ahead and save our view. You can click on views from your main Launchpad toolbar and click on save view. You’ll notice that a box pops up to allow you to name your view. Here you can type what you want to save it as and click on okay. Once the view is done saving, you can now notice that the name will appear in the thin gray toolbar at the top.
One of the last things that I wanted to revisit before we end this tutorial is the tools option on your main toolbar. If you click on tools, you’ll notice that everything listed has manager at the end. What this is including is anything that you’ve created specific to that component type will be harbored in this manager.
For example, if we go ahead and click on monitor manager, what you’ll notice are all the monitors that you’ve created appearing in a list. It’ll let you find the monitors that you’ve created by keywords at the top. You can also see when it was last viewed, and you’ll have the option to check off a monitor and launch it into this view.
Note that if you don’t have anything checked off, you can go ahead and click to create a new monitor directly from this manager. The same applies for any of the other managers that you see listed here. For example, earlier on we created group A to include the chart and the news component. If you click on group manager, you’ll notice that group A appears here, and you’ll be able to see everything that’s listed within that group. This will easily allow you to remove components as well, and create additional groups.
We can close this as well, and on here we’re going to go back to our tools option to see one last thing. The last thing that I want to show under the tools menu is the view manager. If you click on view manager, you’ll notice that another pop-up appears similar to the other ones. On the left hand side at the top, you’ll notice the view that we just created and saved together, alongside the other views that I have previously created. On the right hand side, once you click on one, you’ll be able to toggle through and see pages. The right hand side will recap what components are listed within that view on that specific page.
Something important to highlight is the sample pages and shared pages at the top of this view manager. Once you click on sample view, you can see on the left hand side that sectors are broken down, and you can see specific markets that might be of interest to you. You can click on these and drill down further to see what’s included in each.
If you click on one, on the right hand side you can go ahead and toggle over to components to see what type of components are included in that sample view. A great option is the ability to insert this into your current view so that you can see – what you can see other market players are looking at and how they’re using Launchpad.
Thank you for taking the time to learn more about Launchpad. As I mentioned before, Launchpad is a customizable, window-esque interface that allows you to quickly and easily access the information that is important to you. We have covered the basic components of the Launchpad application here, but if you have further questions or concerns, please contact your account manager or click – click the help key twice on your keyboard.
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