Using Bloomberg API on Excel to find a stock ticker change/acquisition

Question

I am wondering if there is a way in Excel, using Bloomberg API, to find if tickers have changed or acquired by other firms.

For example, given these values,

BOFI US (Axos Financial Inc)
EVHC US (Envision Healthcare Corp)
COOL US (PolarityTE Inc)

it should return

AX US (ticker change on 2018/10/01)
Acquired by KKR on 2018/10/11
PTE US (ticker change on 2018/09/18)

respectively.

Answer 1

Depending on what you want to do, asking for MARKET_STATUS may not be enough, because Bloomberg is reusing tickers. For instance, suppose you have a list of equity tickers that you had in a portfolio some years ago. A stock may have become delisted, but its ticker may subsequently have been given to another stock. In such cases, you may want to check HISTORICAL_ID_POINT_TIME as well.

An example, for which I use R; but you can use the same fields in Excel.

library("Rblpapi")
blpConnect()

ticker <- "DRIV US Equity"
bdp(ticker, c("NAME", "MARKET_STATUS"))
##                                        NAME MARKET_STATUS
## DRIV US Equity GLOBAL X AUTONOMOUS&ELEC-ETF          ACTV

But five years ago, that ticker belonged to a different company.

bdp(ticker,
    "HISTORICAL_ID_POINT_TIME",
    overrides = c(HISTORICAL_ID_TM_RANGE_START_DT = "20130101"))
##                HISTORICAL_ID_POINT_TIME
## DRIV US Equity              1611364D US

bdp("1611364D US Equity", c("NAME", "MARKET_STATUS"))
##                                 NAME MARKET_STATUS
## 1611364D US Equity DIGITAL RIVER INC          ACQU