Hello, and welcome to Bloomberg Essentials training for commodities. My name is Dan and I’m a commodities specialist here at Bloomberg. Today I will take you through the basic of navigating our commodities functionality. We will begin with a brief overview of how to locate and assess both commodity futures and spot tickers and finally discuss some basic analytics that can be utilized with information that we’ve found.
To begin the session, please press the yellow commodity key on your Bloomberg keyboard, then press go, enter. This will take us to our main commodity menu page as shown here. From here, we can select functionality for all of our commodity markets as well as news, analytics and defaults.
Let’s choose option one, finding securities. From here, we will focus on the first selection, number one, CTM, or Contract Table Menu. Please, choose option one. CTM is one of the most important and essential commodity functions on our terminal.
In general, the commodity space is heavily influenced by its futures contracts and by the exchanges that they trade on. Futures contracts are standardized contracts to buy or sell a specified commodity of standardized quality and quantity at a certain date in the future.
In order to navigate this page, we must first know what commodity we are interested in doing. For this session, let’s choose crude oil. Please, select option nine, crude oil. Now, we have navigated to our crude oil contract table screen. Here, we are showing all crude oil future spreads, or swamp tickers, that we currently have available to view.
There are multiple sort options here, so let’s briefly touch on a few before we continue. As you can see from the screen presented, I’ve chosen to sort the page security type all, as seen here.
This allows me to see all futures, spreads and swaps on the screen at any given time. In addition, I’ve also chosen to display these contracts
with open interest figures and sort them alphabetically, as seen here.
It’s also important to note that I’ve chosen no for both no open interests and no volume. This will ensure that I can view all crude oil contracts on our system, regardless on their characteristics, as seen here.
To change any of these defaults, simply click on the amber box and choose from the selections below. Now that our sort defaults are set, let’s choose a contract. NYMEX WTI is the most heavily traded commodity future in the world. As well, it will be our example for the remainder of this session.
Please, scroll down until you see CLA commodity, crude oil WTI, and choose it. When you do, as you see here, a pop-up window appears with three options. We will focus on the first choice, CT or Contract Table. You can choose CT directly from this menu, or you can manually input the command by typing cla, pressing the yellow commodity key and then typing in ct, as shown here.
We are now brought to our next essential function for commodity futures. This will allow us to view the entire contract table for the futures series that we previously selected. In our example, NYMEX WTI has multiple contracts stemming out monthly well into the future.
You can see this under contracts here, 69 contracts stemming forward. If we scroll down as well, we’ll see that they extend all the way out to December of 2017. In addition, they are monthly contracts.
Some other defaults to point out is the availability to change the price and date historically.
(No Ratings Yet)