Datafeed Toolbox

Communication Management

For each of the supported financial data servers, the Datafeed Toolbox uses four commands to manage communication:

• bloomberg, hyperfeed, idc, or yahoo: establishes a connection to the appropriate data server.
• isconnection: verifies that a connection is working.
• get: retrieves connection properties.
• close: terminates the connection.

An additional function, fetch, obtains the desired data from the data server and transfers it to your PC.

Example: The bloomberg Function

Connect to the Bloomberg data server using the bloomberg function. The connection requires a port number and an IP address.

The syntax for the bloomberg function is

• connect = bloomberg(PortNumber, 'IPAddress') 
  

The IP address is entered as a MATLAB string. For example, the command

• c = bloomberg(8194, '123.456.54.123') 
  

returns a Bloomberg connection object:

• c =
   
      connection: 84554360
       ipaddress: '123.456.54.123'
            port: 8194
  

The connection field within the object c contains the Bloomberg connection handle that will be used in processing future data requests.

If you want to accept the default port number and IP address provided when your Bloomberg software was installed, enter

• c = bloomberg
  

with no arguments.

Communicating with a Financial Data Server

Verifying the Connection