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	2025-11-01	4.6
1	2025-10-01	.
2	2025-09-01	4.4
3	2025-08-01	4.3
4	2025-07-01	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	split_coefficient
0	2026-01-09	90.000	90.040	88.32	89.46	89.46	55403077	1.0
1	2026-01-08	90.450	91.250	89.58	90.53	90.53	40068670	1.0
2	2026-01-07	91.555	92.419	90.06	90.73	90.73	36525740	1.0
3	2026-01-06	91.540	91.640	89.74	90.65	90.65	43330972	1.0
4	2026-01-05	90.920	92.630	90.84	91.46	91.46	39183316	1.0