The Scenario
You are a risk manager. The weekly risk committee meets Friday at 2 PM. You have 50 portfolio holdings in an Excel workbook on the Portfolio tab and you need to scan recent news sentiment for every one of them and flag any ticker with a bearish average before the meeting.
The manual version:
- You search for news on ticker one in a financial news aggregator
- You read five headlines, form an opinion, write "neutral" into the workbook
- You do it for ticker two, then ticker three
- Your attention drifts around ticker twelve
- You walk into the 2 PM meeting having checked fewer than half your holdings and two of the ones you missed are down 4% today.
The fast version is one prompt and SheetXAI does the reading.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your workbook that fetches sentiment scores from Alpha Vantage for every ticker and flags the ones that need attention.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch the latest news and sentiment scores from Alpha Vantage for each ticker in column A of the Portfolio tab and write the overall sentiment label and score into columns B and C. Then flag tickers where the average sentiment score is below -0.2 in column D.
SheetXAI calls the Alpha Vantage news and sentiment endpoint for all 50 tickers, writes the overall sentiment label and score into the workbook, and adds the flag for any ticker below the bearish threshold.
What You Get
A sentiment scan across all 50 holdings with three columns of signal data:
- Column B — overall sentiment label (Bullish, Neutral, or Bearish)
- Column C — numerical sentiment score (ranging from -1 to 1)
- Column D — "BEARISH FLAG" for any ticker where the average score is below -0.2
The flag is based on the average across recent articles, not a single headline. One bad article does not trigger the flag. A consistently negative cluster does.
Want the top headlines for flagged tickers in the workbook? Add "for each flagged ticker, write the three most recent headlines into a 'Headlines' section starting at column E" to the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Sentiment data at portfolio scale has its own edge cases. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When some tickers have very few recent articles
Low-coverage tickers may have only one or two articles. A single negative article could produce a misleading average.
Fetch news sentiment from Alpha Vantage for each ticker in column A of the Portfolio tab and write label and score into columns B and C. In column D, flag tickers where average score is below -0.2 AND there are 3 or more recent articles. For tickers with fewer than 3 articles, write "LOW COVERAGE" in column D.
When you want to group flagged tickers by sector
The risk committee wants to know whether the negative sentiment is concentrated in one sector.
After writing sentiment scores and flags for all 50 tickers, fetch sector information from the Alpha Vantage company overview for any ticker flagged in column D. Write the sector into column E for flagged tickers only. Below the main table, add a summary showing how many flagged tickers fall into each sector.
When your highest-concentration positions deserve a tighter threshold
Your top 10 positions by weight deserve extra scrutiny. You want a threshold of -0.1 for those, and -0.2 for the rest.
Read the position weights in column G of the Portfolio tab. For tickers in the top 10 by weight, flag those with average sentiment below -0.1 in column D. For all other tickers, flag those with average sentiment below -0.2. Use different labels: "HIGH WEIGHT FLAG" vs "FLAG."
When you need the full risk committee packet before the 2 PM meeting
You have the ticker list and 90 minutes. You need sentiment scores, flags, sector groupings, headlines for flagged names, and a two-paragraph pre-meeting summary.
Fetch news sentiment from Alpha Vantage for all 50 tickers in column A of the Portfolio tab and write label and score into columns B and C. Flag tickers below -0.2 average in column D. For flagged tickers, fetch their sector from Alpha Vantage and write into column E. Write the 3 most recent headlines for each flagged ticker into columns F through H. Below the main table, add a sector summary. Write a two-paragraph summary into cell A60 of the top risk signals for the committee meeting.
The pattern: the sentiment pull, the flags, the sector grouping, the headlines, and the pre-meeting brief all run before the 2 PM start.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any portfolio workbook, then ask it to pull Alpha Vantage sentiment data and flag the bearish signals. The Alpha Vantage integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull the earnings and IPO calendar in Excel or the Alpha Vantage in Excel overview.