Download Limits
All academic accounts have a downloading limit. This is strictly enforced by Bloomberg. They do not state what the explicit limits are, and there is no programmatic way of finding out ‘what the limits are or what proportion of your limits you have used’. If we have reached our downloading limit users will see the error message when they try to download any additional data.

Bloomberg no longer extends data limits for educational subscriptions. Once a monthly downloading limit is reached, we have to wait until the beginning of the next month before it resets. An error shows in Bloomberg Excel when the monthly download limit has been reached on that terminal. The limits are reset at the start of each month. Bloomberg will not reset them early or extend the limits.
 

Monthly limit - # N/A Review
The monthly limit comes from a proprietary model based on unique securities and depends on the type of data being downloaded. Some data has more value and will use up the quota more rapidly. When the terminal is at its monthly limit users will see #N/A LIMIT error message in Excel. The data limit will automatically reset on the first of the month.



Daily limit - #N/A Daily Capacity
The Daily API limit is 500,000 hits/per day and is reset at midnight. A "hit" is defined as one request for a single security/field pairing.

Open fields - "N/A Limit"
You can have no more than 3500 real time fields open at the same time. If see "NA Limit" as an error message delete some securities/ fields in order for the error message to disappear and to see the values. To test if the limit has been reached: open the Bloomberg terminal, log in, then open a new Excel workbook and paste in the following formula: =BDP("AAPL US Equity", "PX_LAST") If you get one of the above error messages, you've reached a limit.

What You Can Do to Help Yourself and Others
Only download the amount of data you really need.

Run analysis using Bloomberg Query Language - BQL. You can run a query on a large quantity of data and get the answer with no need to save all the data. Refer to the BQL guide on Bloomberg for guidance – type BQLX

Don't use the Excel Add-In. Instead download data from a regular Bloomberg function page. For example, for stock price data use the function then right click on the graph and you can copy and paste the data into Excel.

Disable automatic updates/refreshes – look out for background sheets.

Build API queries offline before downloading them in order to ensure downloading only the securities and fields that you absolutely need. The Equity Screener command (EQS) is particularly useful for this task.

• Type EQS
• Add criteria under section, Screening Criteria; select More Categories to view all screening criteria
• Click Results located in right corner of screen.
• Click Output to save to Excel, PDF or print.

Limit your downloads to 1 session; each time you open/close Excel, you are pulling, even replicating, more data.

Use the Worksheet (W) function in the Bloomberg terminal; this is like a spreadsheet but without download limits.

Once you have the data you need, copy it then paste-as-values or save as CSV to make you don't download the same thing more than once.

Build API queries offline before downloading them in order to ensure downloading only the securities and fields that you absolutely need. The Equity Screener command (EQS) is particularly useful for this task.

Use the DAPI command to access all API support documents, including the Excel API cheat sheet for more efficient query downloads.

Consider using alternative financial data platforms for running securities Excel queries, such as LSEG EIKON, FactSet, and WRDS.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shared post on Time