Bloomberg API request limit

Question

Is there anyway to determine how many requests or how much data you have in your remaining request limit amount for Bloomberg API?

Spermatocyte

Answer 1

Bloomberg 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.

The best information from Bloomberg that I have found is on the WAPI page (in the terminal). On the menus on the LHS, go to WAPI Home > API Resources > API Data Limits. There are two pages, 'Extended Rules and Usage Limits' and 'Managing Your API Data Limits' that shed some further light on the matter.

Broadly speaking... there is a daily limit of individual data requests (i.e. security/field pairs - but duplicates are counted for each request). However, your limit for subscriptions is based on the number of securities you are subscribing to concurrently - i.e. if you expect to be requesting the price of a security every 5 mins, you are much better off subscribing to that security's price. Then there is a monthly limit that is based on the number of unique securities that you are making requests for.

Hardie

In 2021 this does not work anymore. There is not an API Resource or API Data Limits section in the terminal. – Warmth

Answer 2

from Bloomberg HelpDesk on April 2014 (this is valid for a basic desktop client):

We have 3 kind of limits..

You can have no more that 3500 real time fields open at the same time. If you exceed this limit you will see "NA Limit" as error message and you just need to delete some securities/ fields in order for the error message to disappeared and to see the values.

We have also a daily limit. The Daily API limit is 500,000 hits/per day. A "hit" is defined as one request for a single security/field pairing. Therefore, if you request static data for 5 fields and 10 securities, that will translate into a total of 50 hits. so try to refresh just the portion of the spreadsheet that really needs to be refreshed and avoid refreshing it all or reopen it many times a day.

The last limit is a monthly limit. Our monthly limits comes from a proprietary model. Only about 0.4% of our user database ever goes over this limit. This limit is based on unique securities and depends on the type of data being downloaded. For example some of the data on the system such as intra-day is valued a little bit higher than historical end of day for any given list of securities. We do not recommend more than 5000 to 7000 unique identifiers per month and the limit upgrade will only allow you to get data to complete your project. Once a security is used once in a month then if you use it again it will not count again towards the monthly limit.

We normally grant 2 resets per month in case you exceed your daily limit and if you exceed your monthly limit we grant 1 extension per month (10% more), if you breach the limit again you will then need to wait for the midnight for the daily limit to be reset automatically or the end of the month for the reset of the monthly.

Telephonist

If you ask for a field/symbol combo that doesn't exist, I take it you aren't charged? Some symbols have more fields than others, and it's inconvenient to have to know beforehand which. – Fonz

@Telephonist just curious, does this apply to each machine or to each user using the terminal. E.g., if one student exhausts the unique securities monthly limit, will another student be able to log on to the same terminal and pull their own unique identifiers? – Frill

Answer 3

there is an upper limit on Bloomberg API, 500,000 hits per day. -- information from Bloomberg Help Help

Semolina

The limit is different per license type. 500,000 is the limit for the common desktop client. More expensive licenses come with a higher daily and monthly limit. – Epic

I am a little confused: If I want historical one minute data, 500K hits per day corresponds 1/2 symbol year. Is this correct? Or is a single request (IBM for five years, one minute data) eat up 1 of these 500K hits? – Mizzenmast

500k hits - count of request per day, but each request could contain a a lot of data points. For example if you featch historical data for field Px_LAST with period five year for IBM, it would be 252 * 5 data points, and it would be concidered as one request. – Arching

Answer 4

The daily limit is clearly stated - it is the monthly limit that is not to my knowledge disclosed in writing. I have been told the following in the context of discussions about Data Licence, which is one Bloomberg product for bulk data subscription. The monthly limit is expressed as a budget in $, and it is the equivalent price for your requests, priced under the Data Licence schema, which clearly is not secret if you enquire about that product. So why the secrecy about the budget? The reason it is commercially sensitive is that this budget is many times the monthly cost of the Terminal Licence, so clearly if you (a) know what it is and (b) either have access via API to the budget spent (nope) OR write software to 'count the cost' (not hard), then you could pony up a couple of terminals and vastly reduce your Data Licence spend. Bloomberg naturally frown on this sort of activity because it represents an arbitrage opportunity in their pricing model and it is not really 'playing nice'. They likewise do not like if you hit 'the wrong kind of data' too often or the monthly limit at all often, and these activities may prompt them to investigate your business model to be sure you are in compliance with all the T&C of the Data Addendum. Out of courtesy to Bloomberg I am not posting that budget number here, but you should be able to get it from your salesperson and confirm the validity of what I have said, because it may change at any time as it is not part of any contract.

Hilda

Answer 5

I don't believe this is possible programmatically, however if you speak to the Bloomberg helpdesk they will be able to tell you whether you are near the limit, and reset it for you if necessary. Obviously they will only do that a certain number of times. I have not managed to get a definitive answer as to what the limit is, but it's designed to be large enough that you would not hit it just running spreadsheets, which have a limit of 3500 Bloomberg real-time formulas.

Contemptible

Answer 6

If you feel the download limit is not breached but you still get the error message, you can run the following steps to solve the issue:

1. Close Excel completely.
2. From the Windows "Start" menu, select All Programs > Bloomberg > Stop API Process. A command prompt window appears.
3. Press <Enter> to close the window.
4. From the Windows Start menu, select All Programs > Bloomberg > API Environment Diagnostics.
5. Click the Start button.

When the test is complete, if there are any red errors, click the "Repair" button. Re-open Excel and test a formula.

Alonzoaloof

Answer 7

500'000 data points is the approximate daily limit, however remember different types of data use up varying amounts. It is not 1 for 1. Typically requests for esoteric securities and fields will use up more data per request, than PX_LAST for AAPL US for example. Also there are different types of request, such as reference or historic, which will also consume your limit differently.

If you are requesting intra-day realtime data, these fields are typically not charged to your usage limit. Rather you have limits on how many times the realtime 'pipe' can be opened.

Bloomberg are typically very helpful at resetting your monthly data usage limit should you exceed it on an adhoc basis. This is not written company policy, but seems to be part of their customer care. If you are persistently breaching limits each month, they are likely to stop resetting your limits and try to move you to B-PIPE. But otherwise for my experience they are flexible

Glarum