This tutorial gives an example of how the Speed Guide can be used to find the RIC codes for a particular class of financial instrument. In this case we are after the RICs for German Treasury Bonds.
The first step is to open the Speed Guide. Log in to RDTH, select New Request to get to the Set Date Range page. Leave the start and end dates at their default value and click on the Next> button to go to the Create Instrument List page.
On the Create Instrument List page, click on the Speed Guide button to open a Speed Guide window (see below).
The Speed Guide window opens with the THOMSONREUTERS page shown as a default. This is the "home page" of the Speed Guide database, and contains links to other pages containing information arranged by instrument type and geographic location.
THOMSONREUTERS
We are interested in treasury bond instruments, so click on the <BONDS> link to load the BONDS page.
The BONDS page contains information specific to fixed income instruments. Again, it is organised into sub-pages grouped by instrument type and location. We're looking for German bonds, so click on the <G20/DEBT> link.
(note that this is not the only option, we could also try the <TREASURY> link, which is a page containing information on government debt).
The G20/DEBT page is a portal page that contains links to debt instrument pages for nations in the G20 (of which Germany is one). There are a couple of things worth noting about the links on this page:
Each country typically has a Speed Guide page named for the country (eg <AUSTRALIA>)
National sub-pages follow a naming convention in which they are prefixed with a 2-letter country code and a slash. For example, GB/EQUITY is the page for UK equity information and US/DEBT is the page for US fixed income information.
Click on <DE/GOVT1> to go to the page for German government instruments.
Notice the 1 on the end of DE/GOVT1. This usually indicates that the data has become too large to fit on a single 80x24 page and has been split up into multiple pages. In this case there are also DE/GOVT2 and DE/GOVT3 pages. There are links at the bottom of each page to allow for easy navigation back and forth.
Another notable thing about this page is that it contains some links to the Reuters News2000 service. These are the links enclosed in square brackets (eg "[T-DE]" and "[DE/I]"). In Reuters' 3000 Xtra product, clicking on these would result in news stories being displayed to the user. However, news is not currently integrated into RDTH so these are disabled.
Here on the DE/GOVT1 page we are starting to see a lot of links with a 0# prefix. These are chain RICs rather than more Speed Guide pages. A chain RIC doesn't represent an instrument but rather represents a collection of instruments sharing some common characteristic.
In this case, the chain we want for German Government Bonds is 0#DETSY=.
The Speed Guide display for the 0#DETSY= chain is different. Instead of a page, the list of bond RICs that the chain expands to is displayed. This list works in the same way as the RDTH search results page. One or more of the displayed RICs can be selected and added to the instrument list by pressing the Add to Instrument List button.