Bloomberg Highlights: Round 3

Bloomberg  Highlights is back again to show off more of what Bloomberg can do. For more highlights, take a look at Round 1 and Round 2.

Bloomberg Social Media Alert

Bloomberg measures the volume of postings about companies from StockTwits, Twitter, Yahoo Finance message boards, and other social media sites. A BSV alert is triggered by an unusually high number of social media postings regarding a company. Such alerts may be early warning signs of significant company events.

Type BSV and hit the green <GO> key. For individual company alerts, type a ticker (hit the equity key) and then type BSV and hit GO.

For example: F <EQUITY> BSV <GO>

Here is a graph of the velocity alerts of Ford Motor Company showing an unusual pattern of social media alerts.

Private Company Information

Although Bloomberg is primarily a source of financial information about public companies, it does list information about several hundred private companies. These are private companies that have public debt. To see if a company is covered by Bloomberg, type the name of the company into the command line and hit the yellow <Equity> key.

For example, typing Cargill into the command line will bring up a four page company description with links to the company’s financial data.

BOMA Booster: Analyzing Income and Expenses for Commercial Properties

The industry benchmark for 75+ years, BOMA is a compilation of income and expense data for commercial properties across North America compiled by the Building Owners and Managers Association International.

Create Your Own Reports  

The Experience Exchange Reports (EER) are quite specific and include an Occupancy Survey as well as an Income/Expense Report. In addition to overall rental income and operating expenses, the reports include details such as expenses for Cleaning (e.g. window washing), Repair & Maintenance (e.g. HVAC), Utilities, Security, Administration, and Parking.

BOMA allows screening on more than a dozen variables. The basic screen above allows selection by:

Bloomberg Highlights: Round 2

This is the second installment of our Bloomberg Highlights series. If you missed us the first time, click here to view
Round 1. There is a lot of data available on Bloomberg and unless you are looking for something specific, you may never come across some of Bloomberg’s most interesting modules. Below are a few more of Bloomberg’s Best.

Industry Analysis

Bloomberg covers more than 200 industries, and includes data on market share, key data releases, macro data, news, and more. Many industries include an Industry Primer and specialized data for that industry (e.g. drug pricing in the Health Care industry).

Type BI <GO> for access.

Bloomberg Career Center

Type JOBS <GO> to screen for jobs by variables such as region/city, roles/category, salary, experience level, degrees required, and languages. The screenshot below shows the results (52 pages) for a screen on Finance or Economist or Analyst positions in All Regions.

Wrestling with Analyst Reports: A Guide to Downloading from Thomson One

Thomson One should be your first choice for retrieving analyst reports (also called investment bank reports). As we will see, retrieving reports is easy, but downloading the reports can be tricky. Below, we will pin down the procedure for downloading from Thomson One. First, though, make sure that you are using Internet Explorer. Thomson One will only work in IE. Note that Thomson One is currently not compatible with IE10.

Start by clicking on Screening & Analysis, which is either located in the bottom left-hand corner of the database or in the top toolbar.

Then, from the left-hand panel, expand Research and select Research Search.

This will bring you to the screening page for analyst reports.

You can screen for analyst reports by company name (e.g. Apple), industry, or keywords. Make your selections and press Search.

Below is an example of how you could screen for analyst reports by topic. Make your selections, then press Search.