The Scenario
A buy-side analyst is building the first draft of a screening sheet for the weekly portfolio review. Eighty ticker symbols are in column A of an Excel workbook. The review is at 2 PM. It is 10 AM.
The bad version:
- Open Google Finance, type in ticker 1, find the market cap, P/E ratio, and 52-week range, copy four values into columns B through E
- Move to ticker 2, then 3, then 4, noticing that some tickers on Google Finance pull up the wrong share class — GOOG vs GOOGL — and you now have to double-check which one you pulled for each row
- Reach ticker 30 with an hour left before the review, with 50 rows still blank and no time to sanity-check the first 30
Screening decisions get made on the numbers. Numbers you did not have time to verify are not numbers — they are guesses wearing a workbook costume.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the ticker list in column A, calls SerpApi's Google Finance endpoint for each symbol, and writes the financial summary data back — all 80 rows, before the review. One prompt.
For each ticker in column A, search Google Finance via SerpApi and fill in the company name, current price, market cap, and P/E ratio into columns B, C, D, and E
What You Get
- Column B receives the full company name as listed on Google Finance
- Column C receives the most recently available price
- Column D receives the market cap
- Column E receives the P/E ratio, or a blank if the value is not available (loss-making companies)
- Tickers that return no result get a note in column F rather than leaving the row empty and ambiguous
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You also want the 52-week high and low
For each ticker in column A, search Google Finance via SerpApi and write the 52-week high, 52-week low, and latest news headline into columns B, C, and D
Some tickers are ambiguous (multiple share classes)
For each ticker in column A, use the exact symbol including share class suffix (if present in column B) to search Google Finance via SerpApi, and write the company name, price, and market cap into columns C, D, and E
You want to flag tickers with a P/E above 40
Search Google Finance via SerpApi for each ticker in column A, write the company name, price, market cap, and P/E ratio into columns B through E, and flag in column F any ticker where P/E exceeds 40 as "elevated valuation"
Full screening pass with ranking in one prompt
For each ticker in column A, pull market cap and P/E ratio from Google Finance via SerpApi into columns B and C, rank all 80 tickers by market cap descending in column D, and flag in column E any ticker where P/E is unavailable (indicating a net loss)
Screening criteria and ranking in a single pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your equity screening workbook before the next portfolio review, then ask SheetXAI to pull Google Finance data for every ticker. Also see the spoke on pulling Google Jobs data for hiring signal analysis, or the hub overview of all SerpApi workflows.