The Scenario
You're an analyst at an asset management firm. You inherited an Excel workbook with 100 stock tickers in column A — no sector, no industry, no exchange. The previous owner left the firm three months ago. You need to build a sector-level attribution analysis on top of this list, which starts with knowing what sector each ticker belongs to.
One hundred tickers. No metadata. One analyst who also has three other things due this week.
The bad version:
- Look up the first ticker on a financial data site. Note the sector and industry. Type them into columns B and C of the workbook.
- Work through the other 99 tickers, spending 20 to 30 seconds each, hitting brief confusion on several that have been renamed, acquired, or are listed on foreign exchanges.
- Finish 85 tickers before a meeting interrupts you. Come back an hour later and lose your place. End the day with a workbook that's 85% populated and a list of 15 tickers to follow up on.
Attribution analysis requires clean sector data. Clean sector data, apparently, requires an afternoon.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the 100 tickers in column A and, through its built-in Twelve Data integration, fetches company profile data for each and writes sector, industry, country, and exchange into adjacent columns.
Fetch company profile data from Twelve Data for each ticker in column A. Write sector into column B, industry into column C, country of incorporation into column D, and exchange into column E.
What You Get
- Sector, industry, country, and exchange filled for all 100 tickers simultaneously.
- A consistent Twelve Data sector taxonomy across all rows — no format differences between sources.
- Tickers that cannot be resolved noted with UNRESOLVED in column B rather than a blank.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
If you want company name alongside sector for visual verification
Fetch company profile data from Twelve Data for each ticker in column A. Write company name into column B, sector into column C, industry into column D, and exchange into column E.
If some tickers are ETFs rather than equities and need different classification
Fetch company profile data from Twelve Data for each ticker in column A. Write instrument type (EQUITY, ETF, INDEX) into column B. For equities, write sector and industry into columns C and D. For ETFs, write fund category instead of sector. Leave INDEX rows with only the type label.
If you want market cap alongside sector for weighted attribution
Fetch company profile and key statistics from Twelve Data for each ticker in column A. Write sector into column B, industry into column C, and market cap in millions into column D.
Kill-chain: fetch metadata, assign sectors, and build a sector-concentration summary
Fetch company profile data from Twelve Data for each ticker in column A. Write sector into column B and industry into column C. Count tickers per sector and write a summary table starting below the main list: sector name in column A, ticker count in column B, percentage of the total list in column C, sorted largest to smallest. This gives you the sector distribution before you write a single attribution formula.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your ticker list workbook with symbols in column A, then ask it to populate all sector and industry metadata in one pass. Also see filling a valuation dashboard and the full Twelve Data overview.