Stock Market Functions (SMF) Add-in - Get Financial Data in Excel

Over the past couple of days I've been looking for various tools that could help us extract stock markets data in excel. I've earlier talked about the MarketXLS excel add-in which is also a very powerful add-in.

Today I wanted to highlight the SMF Add-in which I came across just a few days back. I just don't know why I didn't know about it earlier. Again, a very powerful excel add-in. The SMF (Stock Market Functions) add-in adds a number of functions to EXCEL that can allow data to be extracted and/or retrieved from the web and placed directly into EXCEL cells or ranges. You can download and learn more about the add-in from their website SMF Add-in. Many thanks to the add-in writer Randy Harmelink who maintains the plugin.

Just to give you a brief, the add-in can be used to extract a variety of data from stock market websites. For example, the following function would return the Market Capitalization value from Yahoo's Market Statistics web page for ticker symbol "MMM"

=RCHGetElementNumber("MMM", 941)

Similarly, the following would return the opening and last traded prices on ticker symbols "MMM" and "IBM":

=RCHGetYahooQuotes("MMM,IBM","ol1")

There are also functions to return a range of options data items to worksheet cells, based on a list of special option ticker symbols and data codes. For example, this would return the bid and ask prices on the specified options contract:

=smfGetOptionQuotes("SPY 12/19 2015 $190 Call","ba")

Go ahead and download the add-in to see how diverse it is and how it can quickly help you automate your financial models.