Exploring AlphaVantage: Accessing Stock Market Data via API

So the API we're going to practice with is called AlphaVantage. And let's check that out. We have a little link here to getting the API key from them, but let's talk about AlphaVantage in general first.

It's a stock market data API. As you can imagine, that's actually pretty big business. They're offering all kinds of information, all kinds of data on what's a pretty valuable set of data to people, the stock market prices.

Do you want to use the stock market data API for software applications, data science, data analytics, algorithmic trading, all kinds of things you might do with this. Now, if we go to about, you can see they work with lots of other organizations. You can partner with them and they have all kinds of documentation of how to use their API.

A good example is we're going to hit up, if we wanted to hit up, say, I want the daily price for something. Say, I want IBM's data. We can click and see IBM's data.

That's not particularly useful to us right now while they're closing and opening prices each day. Not when we're just looking at the data, but when we're working with the data, if we can get it into a data frame, if we can make a spreadsheet out of it, whatever it is we want to do with it. Maybe we just want to make an app that displays stock information or that allows people to purchase stock and be able to see real-time quotes.

All of this is very valuable data for us to have, and there's an interface to it, an application programming interface, an API. If we hit up this URL, we know we'll see something that looks like this. So, again, it's this interface that can be described as when I take this action, I get back this kind of response.

In fact, we're going to write code very much like their language-specific guides here. They have one for JavaScript, one for Python, et cetera. We're going to write code a lot like this that is able to look at a specific URL and get back some data that we can print out.

So, that's what we'll be doing. In order to get set up, what we need is an API key. An API key is kind of like a login where you say who you are and, hey, I'm allowed to access this data.

Not every API uses an API key, but many of them do, maybe most, maybe the majority. An API key is a lot of the time designed to make sure that they're getting paid for what they're doing. In this case, you know, you can pay premium prices for even more real-time bulk quotes and real-time options versus historical options and things like that.

And also make sure that they're not being hit up over and over and over again. They might need to limit how many requests we can make so their servers aren't overloaded. An API key identifies who they are, and if they need to, they can be like, shut that one down, it's accessing us too much, or have that done automatically.

So, an API key is a very typical design for an API to have to make sure they know who you are when you're making this request. Fortunately, and part of the reason we picked AlphaVantage is they have a very easy API to gain access to. If you go to Support, there's a link for Claim Your API Key.

And in fact, we just have that link right here as well. So, to get that API key, all you need to do is let them know who you are, name your organization, put in your email, and click Get Free API Key, and the API key will come immediately right on this page. I already have one, so I'm not going to go through this process, but it's very simple and there's no delay at all.

And you get a free API key. All right, once you have an API key, you're going to copy it to the clipboard and paste it here, and you're going to set it as a string in a variable. Now, again, I already have this.

I'm going to copy mine now, in fact. Okay, that's my API key. Don't take my API key.

It's fine. There are lots of cases where API keys do need to be, are very sensitive, and this is just not one of them. I'm not too worried you're going to abuse my account.

Okay, I don't think you could do anything is the point. Okay, so once you have your API key here in this Python program, the next thing to do is pick a stock symbol. So I'm going to say symbol equals AAPL.

That's Apple. If you choose this one, don't forget it's two A's for Apple. Not, you know, the word Apple, but their stock symbol.

I do know how to spell the word Apple. All right, now you can name your variables anything you want. This is the ones we've used for this URL here.

Here we're using an F string to put these two variables within our URL string. You can name it something else if you want. You just have to also update this if you do so.

This variable and this variable. Choose, make sure that these match. This variable matches this, and this variable matches this, whatever you name it.

This is a very, very, very common name for an API key variable, and the reason it's all in caps if you're unfamiliar is something that's a constant. We often put in all caps because we're just, we're not going to change that API key. It's going to stay the same, and we want other programmers to know like this value, you know, maybe it changed what symbol we're getting, but this value is never going to change, so don't change it.

It's constant. That's all that is. The all caps is an indicator of that.

All right, if you haven't already, run the top block that we gave you. It includes a lot of imports for different libraries that we'll be using throughout the lesson today, and once you've run that, now you'll have requests, and that's the library we'll be using next to make an HTTP request. Let's look at that in our next video.