Portable R for Bloomberg and LSEG (former Refinitiv) Eikon
BloomR is a portable R distribution reshaped in order to get, manipulate and run models against Bloomberg or LSEG Eikon data.
Focus on Data
Connecting R and Bloomberg or Eikon is difficult and time consuming. BloomR has no learning curve: extract its files on your USB flash disk, plug it into any Bloomberg or Eikon terminal where you have access and you are done.
If you prefer to copy BloomR files on your Bloomberg or Eikon terminal, that's fine too.
Work with Data
BloomR has a number of functions to easily get and manipulate Bloomberg or Eikon data: for example, with a single line of code you can get the historical data from all members of a given index in R xts format.
To save you time, BloomR functions can work in bulk with many tickers together, possibly grouped in categories that you define, representing your portfolios, sectors, etc.
Visualise and Communicate your Research
BloomR can save the output of your models in spreadsheet format and can produce template based reports in HTML or PDF format. You may also want to export model plots as figures for your presentation.
In a business environment where you have to produce a lot of similar template based model, for compliance or reporting purposes, BloomR can feed you templates with up to the minute fresh data and release it as a HTML or PDF: the former can be delivered with the company web site, the latter can be circulated as a document.
Integrate with Excel
Your research might need integrations from other data other colleagues or departments. Chance there are they will feed you with Excel data. BloomR can read Excel xlsx files. It can import data from specific Excel sheets or ranges.
In particular, you might want to minimise the risk of errors by using Excel named ranges, e.g. BloomR will just import the Financial_Ratios named range from you peers and you don't have to guess where needed items might possibly be located inside the workbook.
Decoupling the Model Development and Production
Not available in this release You can run BloomR alone (without a Bloomberg or Eikon terminal) in simulated mode. In this way you might design your models and tests with artificial data and, when you think you ready for production, you plug it into a Bloomberg or Eikon terminal and test your models with actual data.
Reproducible Research
BloomR was born primarily as a research tool. The process of manually download lots of ticker data through a spreadsheet and manually accommodating into your sheets, besides being time consuming, is known to be prone to subtle undetectable errors. In BloomR this can be accomplished with a script so that you, your team, your colleagues can exactly reproduce it, fix it, improve it.
In a business environment this also facilitates the process of keeping track and documenting the data mining processes.
No Extra Licensing Restrictions
BloomR itself is free/libre, open source software and it is based on the public APIs released by Bloomberg (Bloomberg Open API) and by LSEG (former Refinitiv). This means that the same licensing terms of your Bloomberg Professional Service and LSEG Eikon service apply to data when you work with it.
BloomR comes in three versions.
BloomR Core is based on R standard GUI. It is light and convenient to run scripts on the data terminals.
BloomR Lab features also a sophisticated editor (based on Emacs) for writing and executing scripts and interactive code.
BloomR Studio Like BloomR BRemacs, but adds a basic LaTeX (MiKTeX) distribution, which allows to generate both HTML and PDF reports from financial data feeds.
Please, see the releases section.
Find in your BloomR directory the subdirectory help intended for learning and reference material.
The new version of the BloomR manual for lecturers (in slide format) is coming soon.
Bloomberg
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Download the latest BloomR release.
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Run the green installer: it will only extract the BloomR files on your chosen directory (perhaps on your USB drive), without further touching your system.
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Run "BloomR.exe" in the main folder.
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Log to Bloomberg service on the same PC (if you are not logged already).
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To get some data, type in the BloomR console:
con <- blpConnect() # Connect BloomR to Bloomberg bdh(c("MSFT US", "AMZN US"), "PX_LAST", start.date=Sys.Date()-5) # Last 5 days for price of these tickers blpDisconnect(con) # Disconnect BloomR from Bloomberg
Eikon
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Execute step 1,2,3 above
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Log to Eikon service on the same PC (if you are not logged already).
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To get some data, type in the BloomR console:
# 2015 monthly prices for Microsoft get_timeseries("MSFT.O", c("TIMESTAMP", "CLOSE"), "2015-01-01T00:00:00", "2016-01-01T00:00:00", "monthly")
This section is intended only for developers willing to build BloomR themselves. Standard users will not need this.
The three flavours of BloomR are entirely built from the bloomr.build.R.
Since BloomR is based on several open source software, when the packages are updated, the script can automatically rebuild BloomR. For example, if a new version of R is out, running the script automatically integrates it in the BloomR build.
Of course, the build script can be of interest for those willing to customise BloomR. For example, to automatically add extra R packages in the installer.
Download bloomr.build.R (as a text file, not as a HTML file, and make sure your browser does not change ".R" extension to ".html" or ".txt"). In the console of R for Windows issue:
source("path\to\bloomr.build.R")
makeBloomR("path\to\workDir")
You will find your BloomR green installer .exe inside workDir.
Note: the build script will download from the Internet the required files (c. 200 MB). Think of this if you have a metered connection.
Browser oddities
Downloading a file as is from you browser can be tangled. Normally you need to a) select All Files in the Save-as option of the browser Save dialog and b) double-quote the filename. In as far as the format is text (not HTML), even if you get a distorted name, like "bloomr_build_R.txt", you can always adjust the source()-path accordingly.
Yes, browsers are strange sometimes.
A decent R version is needed 4+ (perhaps older version will do).
.Platform$OS.type == "windows". xml2 and curl packages are needed, but if missing, the build script will try to download and install them.
R should be able to connect to the Internet.
If you want to find BloomR.zip too in your work directory use:
makeBloomR("path\to\workDir", zip = TRUE)
Since bloomr.build.R downloads resources from the net, one problem you might face is a download error.
Based on my experiences, the script does a good job in detecting download errors, despite it is always possible that a corrupted download is not identified.
When a donwnload error is detected, bloomr.build.R makes a second attempt. You can control this with:
makeBloomR("path\to\workDir", ndown = n)
where n are the download attempts.
When the maximum number of attempt is reached, the script exits deleting any incompleted file and emitting a message detailing the download error.
When you start over (hoping in a better connection), you might not want to download again every and each file, but only those affected by the errors. This is done with the option:
makeBloomR("path\to\workDir", tight = TRUE)
When you run BloomR installer in Windows 10, you might might presented with the following warning:
In order to remove it, I should buy a certificate, which by the way would not make the BloomR installer safer, it would just make simpler to identify me, Antonio Fasano, as the author of the project.
The certificate costs money, while this project is not for profit and does not generate any.
Anyway, BloomR is open source, so you can inspect the code to see if there is any wrong doing and, of course, you can run an antivirus program on the BloomR installer before running it.
Bear in mind that the installer does not require administrator privileges to be executed because it does not affect critical system services.
All that given, to execute the BloomR installer, identify the More info link as displayed in the following screenshot:
After clicking on the link, you get the following:
If you want to run the executable, click Run anyway.
BloomR is build upon several great pieces of free and open source software:
AutoHotkey
Emacs
eikonapir
Nsis
innoextract
Iconset Simplicio CC 3.0 by Neurovit
PeaZip
R
Rblpapi
TinyTeX