Business data induction 2022–11–16

Troubleshooting problems with Bloomberg portfolio analysis

We have covered a range of introductory Bloomberg functions including financial analysis, news and screening for equities. A common topic which the Library has not supported is portfolio management and analysis. We have started to recevie queries from students learning to use the PORT<GO> function in Bloomberg. This session, we looked at some of these queries and how to answer them.

A term which may be unfamiliar is ‘exchange-traded fund’ (ETF) which Fidelity defines as “a basket of securities you buy or sell through a brokerage firm on a stock exchange”.

Questions we have been asked:

1. How do I find ‘Amundi Index MSCI Europe UCTIS ETF DR’?
2. How do I export formatted data from PORT?
3. Where is the ‘Period Analysis’ subtab in the Performance tab?

Finding funds by name

Sometimes you will be asked to find a security from its name, and the name in Bloomberg is not quite the same. You can use the SEAR search function, select Funds, and type words which appear in the name. You can use the FLDS Data Field Finder function to then look up any Bloomberg data field for your selected security. For example, type ‘name’ in the field box and press Enter to see a list of all the data fields with ‘name’ in their name, and the values. You will see shorter and longer form names of the security.

Searching for funds does not work quite the same as searching for other securities (equities, commodities, indices and so on). There should be a ticker to uniquely identify every security, however, we found that some funds we found in Bloomberg generally were different in the PORT tool. We could not simply copy a ticker into the PORT tool and then study it.

To add an EFT in the PORT function, click in the top-left amber field, click ‘[More sources…]’ to see a panel labelled ‘Select portfolio’. Choose a source:

• The first source ‘Portfolios’ shows all portfolios created with that Bloomberg login.
• The source labelled ‘Indexes’ loads a search box on the right. You can type ‘UKX Index’ here, select the best match and click the ‘Select’ button. This gives you the FTSE 100.
• The source labelled ‘Funds/ETFs/13Fs’ loads a search box on the right. You can type the name of the fund here, then select the best match and click the ‘Select’ button.

In the ‘vs’ box, select ‘Default (None)’ to exlude any benchmarks. In the ‘by’ box, select countries or sectors to choose how to group the members of your portfolio. You can choose a date and currency too.

Exporting data from PORT

There are several tabs within PORT to show the holdings of the selected portfolio, the performance and the intraday performance. After the portfolio loads, it will be grouped by country or sector.

To export to Excel, in the red menu bar, click Actions then ‘Generate Report’ then ‘Current tab (Unformatted xls)’ or ‘Current tab (xls)’. After a minute, the report will load in Excel (even if the Bloomberg Excel add-in is not available). You will do your analysis on the Bloomberg terminal where you downloaded the data from.

In the formatted report, you can collapse groups of rows for country or sector. There is more detail in total. In the unformatted report, there are no fancy Excel groups of rows. You can still look at country or sector level and remove the individual member rows. Use the Filter function then select a column which only has data in the country or sector rows. Use the filter at the top of this row to unselect the ‘(blank)’ rows. You can now copy/paste the remaining data or save as CSV to discard the member level data.

Note, you cannot export formatted Excel data from the intraday tab.

Finding the period analysis sub-tab in Performance

In the BMC videos, there are extra sub-tabs in the Performance tab such as ‘Period Analysis’. In the PORT function, check the Bloomberg Help function (press F1) and search it for ‘period analysis’. You will see that there should be more options.

After we contacted Bloomberg help desk, they informed us this feature has been removed. There is a new portfolio function which has replaced it. We didn’t know how to use that. We passed on the message to the course tutors who had set their students tasks which required the period analysis function.