How to leverage Bloomberg for internal research management

By Louis Bellamacina, Research Solutions Specialist, Bloomberg

Don’t let a good trade idea go to waste. European fund managers are scaling back the number of research providers they use in response to MiFID II rules requiring that they pay for analyst reports from brokerage firms. That increases the value of the buy side’s own internal research.

You can use the Bloomberg Terminal to share research notes and internal ratings across an organization. Run RMSD <GO> to access the Research Management Tool (figure1).

Figure 1

The MiFID II rules have forced all fund managers to use only the research services they have paid for to avoid any inducements to trade. This has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of external providers used by the buy side, reducing the amount of research available to portfolio managers.

This makes organizing internal resources all the more important. For example, sourcing a unique insight on the Asian real-estate market from a colleague, pooling insights between the equities and credit desks, or sharing information from company meetings.

• Open the demo version of Bloomberg’s Research Management tool by typing “RMSD” in the command line and hitting <GO>. This is a demonstration screen only. Once it is set up, the shortcut RMN <GO> will allow users to access the tool.
• The filters in the windows above allow the user to navigate to a particular analyst or sector of interest. The window below shows all research and other documentation uploaded to the system by Bloomberg users within the company. This will be filtered depending on the choices in the window above.
• Each entry shows how the information was uploaded to the terminal. As an example, upload one of Bloomberg’s template reports to Note.

Click the Create Custom Reports blue link at the top right of the screen. This will open a pre-prepared template report in Microsoft Word (figure 2). Bloomberg Anywhere users should have the Bloomberg plug-ins for this Microsoft Office product, as with all other Microsoft programs.

Figure 2

• Click the gray Bloomberg tab at the top middle of the screen.
• Click Create New Note on the left.
• A sidebar will appear on the right.
• Give it the title. For this example, type “Meeting Netflix Insights” and add in the ticker NFLX US Equity. Information and data on Netflix should now appear in the document.
• Click Upload in the top right. A preview of the report will appear. Click Upload again to complete uploaded to the terminal. Click View on Bloomberg Terminal.

The uploaded document will appear in a terminal screen with the tags for the primary ticker and the author. Bloomberg will also add other tags that are relevant, based on the primary ticker, such as the sector and country of the company.

These uploaded files can now be accessed using NOTE, RMN and GP NOTE, as well as other Bloomberg functions. Load Netflix in a Bloomberg screen by typing “netflix” in the command line and choosing NFLX US Equity – Netflix Inc. (U.S.). Click GP – Line Chart in the menu that appears. The note should appear on the date when it was uploaded. The shortcut is NFLX US Equity GP NOTE (Figure 3)

Figure 3

All uploaded content will also appear on the user’s Bloomberg Research Portal, BRC <GO>, where it can be shared with colleagues (Figure 4). This should help keep each part of the organization up to speed with what is happening elsewhere.

Figure 4