[R-sig-finance] [R] Bloomberg Data Import to R

[John Marsland]

Andrew Piskorski <atp <at> piskorski.com> writes:

> 
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 02:35:38PM -0000, Robert Sams wrote:
> 
> > I'm a bit confused by the Windoze-only talk. Linux/686 (kernels 2.4
> > and 2.6) is supported by Bloomberg's Server API. See the docs on
> > WAPI. Or am I missing something?
> 
> No one has been talking about Bloomberg's "Server API".  That must be
> some separate and newer product; I don't know anything about it.
> People were discussing the C API and COM API, both of which come with
> the Bloomberg Terminal.
> 

Quite right the Server API is a new product which allows you to do larger
downloads across a small network. Apparently it costs 4 extra Bloomberg licenses
and you still need a license for each client terminal as well! It works on
Windows and Linux/Solaris (I understand that it's only the Desktop API that's
being phased out on Solaris). But you will be able to feed data to unsupervised
quant models from it. Bloomberg are clamping down on users who do big downloads
and will be capping the useage of the Desktop API soon. Also if you are doing
anything with the data you get off Bloomberg other than using it on the PC that
has the Bloomberg license you are in breach of the data license and likely to
get in severe trouble if found out!

The Server API has a lot more security in it and you don't have to be a 'rocket
scientist' to guess that's coming to the Desktop API soon!

The good news is that I was at Bloomberg the other week and they mentioned a
native Java interface "by the end of the year". Java may well be the best way to
get real time data into R since you can let Java handle the event loop and call
back to your R functions just like in JGR/iPlots etc.