Embed live market data in a google sheet

Want to track your port­fo­lio with the list amount of effort?

Setup a Google Sheet with the infor­ma­tion you want (here’s the land­ing page for the tem­plate we use for the Elephant’s Paycheck, you can save a copy and edit it for your own needs).

The rea­son I use Google Sheets is because it makes it easy to incor­po­rate live mar­ket data through a for­mu­la.

What is live mar­ket data?

I want to choose my words care­ful­ly. It’s not ‘real time’ mar­ket data. The infor­ma­tion is delayed about 15–20 min­utes. This has to do with data licens­ing, and goes beyond the scope of this post. If you’re track­ing how you’re doing, but not trad­ing, the small delay is not a con­cern.

What I mean by ‘live mar­ket data’ is that it updates auto­mat­i­cal­ly with­out hav­ing to con­stant­ly update the price of the com­pa­nies you own.

What’s the for­mu­la?

Here’s the for­mu­la to enter the price of a stock into the cell on a Google Sheet:

=GoogleFinance("AAPL", "price")

Just copy that as is into a cell and change AAPL to your tick­er sym­bol.

There’s a lot more you can do with this for­mu­la beyond fetch­ing the cur­rent price. Head over to the Google help page if you want more.