luohy15/financial-skills
Overview
This skill provides a concise reference to the Alpha Vantage API, covering stock, forex, crypto, technical indicators, and fundamental data endpoints. It helps agents find endpoint parameters, recommended formats, and practical usage notes for reliable data retrieval. The content emphasizes pragmatic guidance for integrating Alpha Vantage into automated workflows.
How this skill works
The reference organizes API documentation by category and exposes endpoint details such as required parameters, output formats, and example requests. It highlights preferred data formats (CSV when available), response size handling, and practical steps for storing API responses to files before parsing. Setup instructions for obtaining and supplying an API key are included to make requests immediately reproducible.
When to use it
- Fetching historical or intraday stock, forex, or crypto price series for analysis or backtesting
- Requesting technical indicator calculations (SMA, RSI, MACD, etc.) directly from the API
- Pulling company fundamental data for valuation or screening workflows
- Integrating a low-friction data source for prototyping trading signals or dashboards
- Exporting compact tabular data when minimizing response size and parsing complexity
Best practices
- Obtain and set an API key via environment variable ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY or a .env file before making requests
- Prefer datatype=csv when both CSV and JSON are available to reduce payload size and simplify parsing
- Write raw API responses to temporary files first, then read with size limits to avoid overwhelming processing contexts
- Respect rate limits: space repeated requests and cache results locally to reduce API usage
- Validate timestamps and numerical fields after parsing; normalize time zones and handle missing values explicitly
Example use cases
- Download intraday CSV series for a ticker, save to a file, and run a local indicator computation pipeline
- Request daily adjusted time series for multiple tickers, cache results, and use them for a backtest run
- Retrieve cryptocurrency exchange rates and feed them into a real-time monitoring dashboard
- Fetch company earnings and balance-sheet fields for automated fundamental screening
FAQ
Sign up at Alpha Vantage and add the provided key to ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY in your environment or .env file.
CSV or JSON — which should I use?
Prefer CSV when available for tabular datasets because it is more compact and easier to parse; use JSON when you need nested structures or richer metadata.
