The Scenario
A trader you know runs their portfolio tracker entirely in Excel. Thirty-five holdings, four columns they care about: symbol, price, dollar change, and percent change. They refresh it twice a day — once before the open, once at close. The refresh consists of typing in numbers from a quote page one ticker at a time.
They described the process to you last week. "It's fine," they said. "Takes about 25 minutes."
Twenty-five minutes, twice a day, five days a week. You did the math.
The bad version:
- Open a quote feed, find the first ticker, note price, dollar change, and percent change, and type the three numbers into the corresponding row of the Excel workbook.
- Repeat for 34 more tickers. Typos are invisible until the formulas that depend on these numbers produce a result that doesn't match what you saw on the quote page.
- Miss three tickers because you answered a Slack message mid-refresh. Discover the miss when a position shows yesterday's close three hours into the session.
Half-refreshed data is worse than no refresh. You're making decisions based on a mix of current and stale quotes with no way to tell which is which.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the 35 tickers in column A and, through its built-in Twelve Data integration, fetches live quotes for all of them at once and writes price, dollar change, and percent change into columns B, C, and D.
Fetch the latest real-time quote from Twelve Data for each stock symbol in column A. Write current price into column B, dollar change into column C, and percent change into column D.
What You Get
- Columns B, C, and D updated for all 35 holdings simultaneously — not ticker by ticker.
- Percent change as a decimal (e.g., -0.023 for -2.3%) for formula compatibility.
- Any symbol with no live quote (halted trading, bad ticker format) flagged in column E with a short note, leaving the row's existing values intact rather than replacing them with zeros.
- A timestamp noting when the refresh ran, written to the header row.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
If your ticker list includes symbols from multiple exchanges with potential naming conflicts
Fetch live quotes from Twelve Data for each symbol in column A. Where column B already contains an exchange code (NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE), pass it as a qualifier. Write current price into column C, dollar change into column D, and percent change into column E.
If you want to add a column showing how far the current price is from the daily high
Fetch live quotes from Twelve Data for each ticker in column A. Write current price into column B, dollar change into column C, percent change into column D, and day high into column E. In column F, calculate how far the current price is below the day high as a percentage and write the result.
If some rows in column A are blank placeholders for positions not yet filled
Skip any blank rows in column A. For all non-blank symbols, fetch live quotes from Twelve Data and write current price into column B, dollar change into column C, and percent change into column D.
Kill-chain: refresh all quotes, flag positions down more than 5%, and update a summary row
Fetch live quotes from Twelve Data for each non-blank ticker in column A. Write current price into column B, dollar change into column C, percent change into column D. In column E, flag any position with a percent change worse than -5% with ALERT. At the bottom of the sheet, write a summary row showing: total position count, number of positions up, number of positions down, and the ticker with the largest negative percent change.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your Excel portfolio tracker with tickers in column A, then ask it to refresh all 35 quotes at once instead of one at a time. Also see pulling historical closing prices and the full Twelve Data overview.