Q. Bloomberg Terminal - Read Before You Use: Overview and Data Download Limits

Bloomberg L.P. provides financial software tools and enterprise applications such as analytics and equity trading platform, data services, and news to financial companies and organizations through the Bloomberg Terminal (via its Bloomberg Professional Service), its core revenue-generating product.[9] Bloomberg L.P. also includes a wire service (Bloomberg News), a global television network (Bloomberg Television), websites, radio stations (Bloomberg Radio), subscription-only newsletters, and two magazines: Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Markets.

The Bloomberg Terminal is not available remotely. 

The Bloomberg terminal is available for on-campus, in-person use during the following hours: Monday to Friday, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., except Tuesdays, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

Bloomberg Download limits

Please be judicious in downloading data to avoid hitting the limits for yourself and all other users.

All academic accounts have a downloading limit. This is strictly enforced by Bloomberg. They do not state what the explicit limits are, and there is no programmatic way of finding out ‘what the limits are or what proportion of your limits you have used’.  If we have reached our downloading limit users will see the error message when they try to download any additional data. Bloomberg recently changed its policy and no longer extends data limits for educational subscriptions. Once a monthly downloading limit is reached, we have to wait until the beginning of the next month before it resets. There is no way of knowing whether the monthly data limit has been reached until it has been exceeded.

1. Monthly Downloading limit: The monthly limit comes from a proprietary model. This limit is based on unique securities and depends on the type of data being downloaded. For example some of the data on the system such as intra-day is valued a little bit higher than historical end of day for any given list of securities. When we have reached our monthly downloading limit, users will see the #N/A Limit or #N/A Review error message when they try to download. 

2. Daily downloading limit: The daily limit is clearly stated in Google: The Daily API limit is 500,000 hits/per day. A “hit” is defined as one request for a single security/field pairing. Therefore, if you request static data for 5 fields and 10 securities, that will translate into a total of 50 hits. If you exceed this limit you will see #N/A Daily Capacity as an error message. 

3. Open fields: The third limit consists of open fields. You can have no more than 3500 real time fields open at the same time. If you exceed this limit you will see “NA Limit” as an error message and you just need to delete some securities/ fields in order for the error message to disappear and to see the values.

IMPORTANT: Please seek advice before downloading data for a large number of securities from either Library staff or using the Bloomberg Help function.  Also consider alternative databases that may have the information you need (and can be used remotely as well) such as Capital IQ (Excel plug-in available), and LSEG Workspace. 

What can I do to avoid hitting the download limit?

There are a few tips we can offer to reduce the risk of tripping the download limits which affect everyone at IESE.

1.    Use the regular Bloomberg terminal rather than Excel wherever possible (there is no download limit within the terminal, though there are other restrictions on dates, number of rows, and so on).

2.    Use the Worksheet (W<GO>) function in the Bloomberg terminal, this is like a spreadsheet but without download limits.

3.    Use the BQL functions in Excel. Quoting: "Bloomberg Query Language lets you screen, aggregate, backtest, and run statistical analysis on a large security list with a single query. For example, instead of downloading 1,000 prices and then averaging them in your spreadsheet, you can use BQL to download just the average, saving you 999 hits”

How do I get started with BQL? 
From the Bloomberg terminal: 
•    BQLX: Support documentation. In addition to an Excel Formula References (formulas for the two query methods, cell referencing, display parameters, helper formulas), Bloomberg supplies "Getting Started" guides - including video tutorials, spreadsheets, and cheat sheets - for equities, funds, fixed income, economics, and portfolios.
•    NI FFM BQL: Bloomberg "Functions for the Market" case studies featuring the practical application of BQL. 
•    "BQL Builder": Found in the Excel ribbon (includes sample queries).
•    Bloomberg for Education videos: 5-part series for how to effectively use BQL.

4.    Do not download data on more securities and fields than you really need.

5.    Disable any automatic updates or refreshes for Bloomberg functions, especially in any background sheets.

6.    Once you have the data you need, copy it then paste-as-values or save as CSV to make you don't download the same thing more than once.

7.    If you still need to download a lot of data, do so at the end of the calendar month.

8.    Contact us for further advice.