Example: we want to chart the historical movement of crude oil price for the past 5 years.
As already explained before, we can use natural language in Bloomberg's command line. For example, if we do not know the ticker for crude oil, we can do the following and select the historical price index.
Then use the GP (Line Chart) function either from the menu that appears or from the command line.
The chart is displayed. Operations to customize the chart are explained in the Charts section.
Example: observe the livestock futures contracts.
Function CTM (Exchange Contracts) allows us to search among futures contracts based on their category, exchange, or region.
Using the three radio buttons on top of the page we can set the criteria by which we want to perform the search.
The search box can also be used to narrow down the search by typing in the keyword and pressing <GO>. To display a list of tickers for a commodity type, select it from the screen.
To display a list of tickers for a commodity type, select it from the screen, for the purposes of this example choose Livestock.
A table with various livestock futures contracts is displayed. We can export it by clicking on the red Export button, which will download an Excel file, set the filters of non-zero volume or open interest using the Filters button or edit the table display from Edit Columns.
Clicking on an individual contract opens a new small window, which offers a few functions to obtain additional information about it.
Example: draw in one chart the 10-year historical oil production of the following OPEC countries: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.
Function OPEC (OPEC Production and Price) provides monthly oil production and estimates for both OPEC as a whole and for its individual member countries.
The default Bloomberg selection as the Data Source shows aggregate and individual OPEC country data for current and historical production and charts the spare capacity for members.
In the Production table, right click on an individual country's name to access a list of functions available to analyze its historical data. For charts Total Monthly Estimated OPEC Crude Production and Spare Capacity, right click anywhere and select Copy/Export Options to get a list of possible ways to export the data (as data which can be pasted to for example Excel or as image).
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Choose Rystad Energy option to obtain a table or a chart of historical production data by country, which we need to do as per instructions of this exercise.
Now change the display from Data to Chart using the two radio buttons. Then, in order to display data for individual countries instead of regions, also change the view from By Region to By Country.
Select the required countries from the Country section on the left. As shown, we have also applied the setting to display only OPEC countries in this section to be able to find Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran faster.
Right clicking on the chart canvas will open a menu with option to customize the chart and also the Copy/Export Options which can be once again used to either copy the data to clipboard (and for example paste it to Excel) or save the chart in the image form.
Example: we want to see the gold price forecasts for Q4 24, namely which of the contributors has the highest estimate and which has the lowest.
Function CPFC (Commodity Price Forecasts) allows us to analyze the experts' forecasts for commodities prices in the future.
To change the display from a contributor composite to an individual provider, find the desired one from the amber box Contributor Name or click on Browse to open a window with a list of all available contributors and select it from there.
Change the displayed category of commodities to Metals from the Category drop-down menu. We could also use the As Of field to change the date of contributed data and thus observe the estimates from the past.
We will click on Gold $/t oz to access elaborate data for analysts' estimates of future gold prices.
A lot of different kinds of analyses can be performed here, but for the purposes of this example, let us just sort the firms according to their Q4 24 estimates (by clicking on the Q4 24 column name) and read out the most pessimistic and optimistic one.
We can observe that Societe Generale SA provided the highest forecast of 2175 USD, and both Bradesco BBI SA and Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimate the price to drop to 1800 USD in the last quarter of 2024, while the median forecast of all contributors sits at 1990 USD.
