Bloomberg has data on more than 5 million bonds, equities, commodities, currencies, and funds. It covers most every publicly traded company in the world, and has profiles on more than a million people.

Navigation in Bloomberg is via a decentralized, command driven system. Securities are organized by market silos and can be access via drilling down a series of menus or by entering a command. Commands to retrieve information are represented by codes.

Being a decentralized database, there are three things to keep in mind:

Hierarchical nature of information, but not "main" menu. Each market is its own "silo." With use of a command, you can jump from silo to silo.



With more than 25,000 codes, the key to becoming an expert Bloomberg user is to