Bloomberg: terminal market data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Bloomberg is a licensed commercial dataset (Bloomberg L.P.), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no Bloomberg terminal credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Bloomberg is a market-data terminal and data-feed service operated by Bloomberg L.P. It covers spot and forward FX, money-market and OIS rates, futures, government and corporate bond yields, inflation swaps and inflation-linked-swap rates, equities, and derived analytics, retrieved by Bloomberg ticker and field mnemonic. It is a common source in asset-pricing and fixed-income research: used in, for example Siriwardane, Sunderam & Wallen (spot rates, FX forwards, OIS rates, futures, Treasury yields, and inflation swaps used to build 32 arbitrage spreads), and Dittmar, Hsu, Roussellet & Simasek (inflation-linked-swap zero-coupon rates and OIS rates as model estimation targets).

• Cost: licensed, per-terminal subscription. Data access is tied to terminal entitlements. No free tier.
• Vendor: Bloomberg L.P.
• Coverage: cross-asset global market data and reference data, real-time and historical.

Access (when licensed)

• Bloomberg Terminal. The primary interface; data is keyed on Bloomberg tickers and field mnemonics (e.g. PX_LAST, YLD_YTM_MID).
• Excel add-in (BDP/BDH functions). Point-and-click pulls from within Excel using the same ticker/field syntax.
• blpapi (the official Bloomberg API). Low-level C++/Java/Python/other interface for programmatic pulls; requires an entitled terminal session or Bloomberg server-side licence.
• xbbg or pdblp (Python wrappers). Third-party wrappers over blpapi for Pandas-friendly pulls; still require an active blpapi session and entitlements.
• Bloomberg Anywhere. Remote access via browser or app; same entitlements apply.
• Credentials (terminal login) are required for all paths. Keep them out of version-controlled files.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Redistribution is contractually restricted. Data is entitled per terminal and per user; you generally may not republish or share raw Bloomberg series. Reproducibility therefore relies on documenting exact tickers and fields rather than sharing the data itself.
• History can be revised. Pulls are point-in-time and Bloomberg can restate history, so re-pulling later can return different values for the same ticker/date. Record the pull date and, where possible, the data vintage. Rate-limited daily download caps also apply.
• Ticker and field conventions are Bloomberg-specific and change. The distinction between yield and price fields, generic versus specific futures contract tickers, and roll conventions for futures are easy to mis-state. Document the exact field mnemonic (e.g. YLD_YTM_MID versus PX_LAST) and the exact ticker string used.
• Composite and evaluated quotes differ from transaction data. Prices such as CBBT (Bloomberg Composite Bond Trader) and BVAL (Bloomberg Valuation) are dealer composites or model-based evaluations, not executed trades. State which quote type you use and be aware it may differ from transaction prices in illiquid markets.
• Snap times and time zones vary by asset and region. The meaning of “close” differs across equity, FX, and fixed-income markets, and across regions. Document the snap time and time zone for each series.
• No programmatic access without an entitled session. There is no anonymous or API-key-only path; every pull requires an active, licensed terminal session. Automated pipelines must be run from a machine with a valid session.

Citation

Cite Bloomberg L.P., listing the exact tickers and field mnemonics, the snap time and time zone, and the pull date, since the raw data cannot be redistributed. For example: Bloomberg L.P., tickers [list], field [mnemonic], [snap time, time zone], accessed YYYY-MM-DD.