Bloomberg Fires Up Launchpad 2010

Bloomberg is halfway through migrating clients of its Windows-style Launchpad configurable display to the latest version, Launchpad 2010, which includes new analytics, displays tailored to individuals' workflows, and tools to increase collaboration between users.

Bloomberg officials expect to complete the rollout to all users of Launchpad - which is available to all Bloomberg Professional clients - by the end of this year. Currently, around 150,000 of the more than 287,500 total Bloomberg Professional subscribers use Launchpad.

The main display of Launchpad 2010 comprises a market monitor of prices, rates and indexes, a charting pane, components for news and economic reports, and a segment broadcasting Bloomberg TV, as well as a new heatmap-style graphic dubbed Market Map, which represents a market using concentric circles - for example, starting at the country level in the center, then moving outwards through sectors, industries and sub-industries - color-coded in green or red to show performance, from where users can drill down to individual securities.

Users can also re-size different parts of the screen to focus on one area or maintain a view across different markets, and can insert rows into the market monitor to include other data in the main display.

"Five years ago, an equity trader would have focused on equities, and maybe equity derivatives. But now he has to think about credit default swaps, foreign exchange rates, and things he isn't familiar with," says Eugene Sorensen, product manager for Launchpad 2010.

Users can also combine, compare and annotate charts to share ideas with colleagues - a function that has been expanded in the new version. In previous versions of Launchpad, users could share component windows showing a particular price, graph or other item of content by dragging them into the Instant Bloomberg messaging application, but clients can now share their entire display-for example, so an entire trading desk can use the same workspace.

"Sharing content between colleagues... reduces the time taken to make decisions, and also reduces risk, since they are seeing the same information together in real time," Sorensen says.
The platform also introduces a "My News" component, which not only allows users to sort news by regions, markets, most recent and most read items, but also creates a personalized news feed for each user of headlines that the system deems of interest to an individual based on their role, location, and by tracking what else they look at in Bloomberg Professional.

Users can also customize another new function, Chart Grid, which displays a page of thumbnail charts, each showing the same or different analysis for different economic regions, indexes, portfolios or individual securities, to which users can add or subtract views, and interact with by changing timeframes across all charts.