How to download a lot of data from Bloomberg?
I am trying to download as much information from Bloomberg for as many securities as I can. This is for a machine learning project, and I would like to have the data reside locally, rather than querying for it each time I need it. I know how to download information for a few fields for a specified security.
Unfortunately, I am pretty new to Bloomberg. I've taken a look at the excel add-in, and it doesn't allow me to specify that I want ALL securities and ALL their data fields.
Is there a way to blanket download data from Bloomberg via excel? Or do I have to do this programmatically. Appreciate any help on how to do this.
Answer
Such a request in unreasonable. Bloomberg has dozens of thousands of fields for each security. From fundamental fields like sales, through technical analysis like Bollinger bands and even whether CEO is a woman and if the company abides by Islamic law. I doubt all of these interest you.
Also, some fields come in "flavors". Bloomberg allows you to set arguments when requesting a field, these are called "overrides". For example, when asking for an analyst recommendation, you could specify whether you're interested in yearly or quarterly recommendation, you could also specify how do you want the recommendation consensus calculated? Are you interested in GAAP or IFRS reporting? What type of insider buys do you want to consider? I hope I'm making it clear, the possibilities are endless.
My recommendation is, when approaching a project like you're describing: think in advance what aspects of the security do you want to focus on? Are you looking for value? growth? technical analysis? news? Then "sit down" with a Bloomberg rep and ask what fields apply to this aspect. Then download those fields.
Also, try to reduce your universe of securities. Bloomberg has data for hundreds of thousands of equities. The total number of securities (including non equities) is probably many millions. You should reduce that universe to securities that interest you (only EU? only US? only above certain market capitalization?). This could make you research more applicable to real life. What I mean is that if you find out that certain behavior indicates a stock is going to go up - but you can't buy that stock - then that's not that interesting.
I hope this helps, even if it doesn't really answer the question.