Stop tiring yourself programming while there is no-code
At the time when I was getting started with APIs and how can it be used to extract market data, I could say the learning process was a bit exaggerating because it was difficult for me to grasp the API-related concepts, and not to mention, coding the entire thing from scratch adds even more bitterness. This is not only applicable to APIs but anything related to programming.
But as everyone says, times are changing. At present, you don’t have the necessity to learn everything about programming in order to create something of your own but just the basics would do it and the rest can be taken care of with the help of the so-called ‘No-code tools’. To me, this is a revolutionary idea that enables its users to create their desired project without any coding. With the assist of no-code tools, people can save a tremendous amount of time spent on learning to code.
I’m personally a huge fan of these no-code tools and when I heard the idea of using such tools to extract market data, I was over the moon. In this article, I’m going to explain how the EOD Historical Data’s Excel Add-In can be used to extract both historical data and fundamental data with just a few clicks. Without further ado, let’s dive into the article!
Note: This article is intensely based on the Excel Add-In feature provided by EOD Historical Data. So to follow up with the upcoming content without any distress, make sure that you have an account for yourself as it enables you to access your private API key. You can create an account using the link here. Also, the feature represented in this article may not be free but a subscription is needed. View the pricing of all subscriptions here and choose what best fits you.
Get market data directly into your Excel file
The first and foremost step of this process is to install the EO
D Historical Data’s Excel Add-In for historical market data and fundamental data. All you have to do is to click the link here and the installation will start automatically.
After successfully installing the Add-In, you can now be able to see the custom 'EOD' ribbon tab on the top-left corner of Excel. Now the next step in this process is to register your API key in order for the Add-In to function. To register, head over to the 'Limits' group and select the 'Set API key' option.
After selecting that option, a new window pops out where it requests you to enter the API key. After entering your API key, you can hit the 'Save' button to register it. We are now set to extract some data!
Extracting Historical or End-of-day stock data
To extract the historical data of stocks, we have to first navigate to the 'Get historical data' option under the 'Commands' group. After selecting it, a new separate window pops up which looks like this:
After observing the new window shown above, it can be said that it is just an interface to enter the required inputs for extracting the historical data.
The first input is 'Tickers' where we should enter the symbol of the stocks we are willing to extract the data. It can either be a single stock or multiple stocks but the important thing to be remembered is that the tickers must be mentioned along with the exchange. If that is a bit confusing, you can opt-in to the 'find ticker' option where you can search for stocks.
The second input is 'Period' where we have to specify the time interval between the data points. Daily time interval is the default period but there are other options to choose from like Weekly, and Monthly time intervals. The final two inputs are the 'from' and 'to' where we have to enter the starting date and ending date of the historical data respectively.
After filling out all the necessary inputs, we just have to click the 'Load' button, and voila! You will have the historical data of the stocks you mentioned along with a beautiful candlestick chart for helping us make more sense out of the data. When multiple stocks are specified as inputs, different Excel sheets will be created automatically, each having the corresponding stock data. Here is an example of how the final result would look like:
Extracting Fundamentals data
The process for accessing fundamental data is relatively simpler than historical data. All you have to do is just head over to the 'Get fundamental data' function on the 'Commands' group, and after selecting it, simply specify the symbol of the stock you’re interested in getting data.
Within seconds, the output will be printed out in the Excel sheet in which you’re currently working on and I’ve decided not to represent it in an image because it is massive in size.
Some people would prefer specific items or sections rather than everything that comes with the fundamentals data. This can be achieved easily with the use of the dropdown menu (as seen on the above image) which allows us to select items we’re particularly interested in. The dropdown includes every important aspect such as the General information, Highlights, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and finally Earnings.
Closing Notes
In this article, we learned how the EOD Historical Data’s Excel Add-In can be used to extract the historical and fundamentals data of stocks in seconds seamlessly with literally zero lines of code.
There are also some pre-defined functions that come along with the Excel Add-In which allows us to extract the end-of-day data for the stocks specified and the given starting and ending date. We didn’t cover such functions in this article but it is worth the while to have a look at those since it helps us save a lot of time.
Remember that this article is just a small glimpse of how no-code tools are revolutionizing and becoming a game-changer in a lot of industries. It can also be seen how these tools are so efficient which allows us to do any sort of task feasibly no matter how complex it is. Not to mention, the era of no-code is just getting started and so this is not the time where we scrutinize whether is it even going to be useful or not for advanced users but rather opt-in and adapt ourselves to it.
Hope you learned something new and useful today. Also, you can refer to the original documentation of the Excel Add-In if you want to know more information about it: https://eodhistoricaldata.com/financial-apis/excel-vba-api-downloader/
Nice and crisp. Happy to know the details of no-code applications, it's user friendliness etc...