Appendix D — The AlphaVantage API

The AlphaVantage API is a wealth of financial and market datasets.

For more information, see the APIs tutorial.

After obtaining an API key, and setting the API Key as a notebook secret, we are able to access the API key in a secure way:

from google.colab import userdata

API_KEY = userdata.get("ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY")

Then we supply the API Key value along with our requests.

For example, requesting unemployment rates:

from pandas import read_csv

request_url = f"https://www.alphavantage.co/query?function=UNEMPLOYMENT&apikey={API_KEY}&datatype=csv"
df = read_csv(request_url)
df.head()

	timestamp	value
0	2025-08-01	4.3
1	2025-07-01	4.2
2	2025-06-01	4.1
3	2025-05-01	4.2
4	2025-04-01	4.2

Requesting stock prices:

from pandas import read_csv

symbol = "NFLX"
request_url = f"https://www.alphavantage.co/query?function=TIME_SERIES_DAILY_ADJUSTED&symbol={symbol}&apikey={API_KEY}&datatype=csv"
df = read_csv(request_url)
df.head()

	timestamp	open	high	low	close	adjusted_close	volume	dividend_amount	split_coefficient
0	2025-10-08	1197.11	1217.000	1192.00	1214.25	1214.25	2846675	0.0	1.0
1	2025-10-07	1177.79	1201.365	1177.46	1191.06	1191.06	3309094	0.0	1.0
2	2025-10-06	1160.37	1163.580	1145.45	1163.31	1163.31	2968596	0.0	1.0
3	2025-10-03	1165.00	1168.000	1143.22	1153.32	1153.32	3137365	0.0	1.0
4	2025-10-02	1161.50	1163.330	1134.00	1162.53	1162.53	4685467	0.0	1.0