Bridge Information Systems's Telerate© is installed on all the machines in Rooms 3, 7, 21, and 24 of the OIM Lab in the basement of David Kinley Hall. Bridge is also available on some of the BizNet machines in the Commerce Library.

To launch Bridge, open the folder marked "Course Resources" and double click on the icon marked "Telerate". You should see a screen which looks like figure 1; be patient, since it takes a while to load. When it has loaded, you should see a screen like figure 2 (small / full size). If it looks like a spreadsheet, that's intentional. Bridge screens look like spreadsheet sheets in which the cells are live connections to actual markets.

Maximize it; you'll need all the display space you can get.

Bridge can be installed on Computers in Faculty Offices and on Laptops. The Finance Department Laptops have Bridge installed so that it may be demonstrated in the Classroom. The Computer systems in 241 and 243 have Bridge installed.

Installation requests should be addressed to Professor V G France

Bridge offers a number of pre-constructed screens as well as the ability to construct and save your own. We have found that the Telerate preconstructed screens are uniformly useless so we have revived some of the old BridgeStation pre-constructed screens and added a few of our own.

If you are working from one of the classroom computers you can use the UI pre-constructed screens by downloading the blf file and saving in the BRIDGE/BWS32/packages/ps00 folder.

To save hold down the [Shift] key when you click on the link. This will prompt your browser your browser to "save as".

You might want to take a look at some of the pre-constructed screens,- just to get an idea of what Bridge can do. The extent of the data and Information available through Bridge is staggering. Begin one screen at a time, or one project at a time and soon you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

In the menu bar at the top of the screen the first menu item is "Workspace". Click on "Open". A list of pre-constructed screens will pop-up. Choose one. If in doubt choose "UI-dowtrade". Click on OK.

Bridge will open four displays:

You can expand or adjust any of the displays.

When you construct your own screens you can add displays and adjust them until you get any configuration that suits you. If you want to save the construction use Workspace/SaveAs and save the construction. Saved constructions can then be opened in the same way as any other pre-constructed screen.

Note: You cannot save constructions on the OIM Lab computers.

Bridge keeps four separate sets of historical data:

  1. Monthly data goes back 15 years; Bridge's abbreviation for Monthly is MO.
  2. Weekly data goes back for 5 years: Bridge's abbreviation for Weekly is WK.
  3. Daily data goes back for about 1 year; Bridge's abbreviation for Daily is DA.
  4. 5-minute data covers about 100 5-minute periods; Bridge's abbreviation is TR (for TRade summary).
For printouts of historical data, use the Tabular Historical Data command on the Analytics screen. Daily data is the default, so you can get daily data on IBM stock by typing "IBM/THD" and keep hitting return until you get tired. Or you can ask for "IBM/THD/MO" and get monthly data instead.

Choose Workspace, Add Display, News Watch and type in the stock symbol (MSFT, for example) in the white area in the upper left (above where it says "symbol") and hit return. You should something like figure 30 (small / full size). Just double click on any Headline to see the whole news story.

One group of students was assigned a Clark Refining and Marketing Inc Bond to analyze. They began with Bond Search. They typed in "Clark Refining and Marketing" and got nothing. Then they typed in "Clark" and Bond Search responded with the names of several companies that included the string "Clark", including "Clark Refining & Marketing". They double clicked on "Clark Refining & Marketing" and Bond Search responded with a long list of bonds. Double clicking on the bond they were given to analyze helped with the bond information but not with Corporate Information.

The ticker symbol atttached to the Clark Bond was TZH. This made the students slightly suspicious because a quick check with the Analytics screen confirmed that TZH was Trizec Hahn Corp, not Clark Refining & Marketing.

The students next went to News Search on TZH and saw something like figure 31 (full size). The article dated May 07, 1997 "Clark USA announces improved first quarter operations..." reveals that

    Clark USA, Inc. through its principal operating subsidiary Clark Refining & Marketing, Inc., is based in St. Louis, Missouri and operates in the central United States. It owns three petroleum refineries, 16 distribution terminals, a crude oil terminal and an LPG terminal, and operates over 800 gasoline and convenience product stores. Clark USA is 46% owned by TrizecHahn Corporation, a publicly listed company on the New York, Toronto and Montreal stock exchanges.
Another article dated November 3, 1997 revealed
    New York--Nov 3--The Blackstone Group, a New York private investment bank, said it has paid $135 million for TrizecHahn Corp.'s 65% controlling interest in the common equity of Clark USA, Inc., a St. Louis based independent oil refiner and operator of gasoline and convenience stores. Clark's other shareholders, Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Gulf Resources Corp. will retain their minority ownership interests, according to a Blackstone statement.
    Clark's total market capitalization, which reflects both publicly- traded debt and privately-held equity, is approximately $1.1 billion.
    Clark is the 6th largest independent refiner and marketer of petroleum products in the US with one Texas Gulf Coast refinery and 2 in Illinois representing more than 350,000 barrels per day of rated crude oil throughput capacity.
    Clark is also the 7th largest direct operator of gasoline and convenience stores in the US with over 800 retail outlets in 10 Midwestern states. Clark's total annual revenues are in excess of $4 billion.

The students now had enough information to fill in their report.

These students also learned that to copy this information you need to highlight the part you want, right click, and choose Copy to Clipboard.