Alpha Vantage — Stock and Market Data

Alpha Vantage's REST API for stock prices, fundamentals, technical indicators, forex, crypto, and economic indicators. ~20+ years of historical equities data, real-time-ish quotes (15-minute delayed on free tier), and structured fundamental data parsed from SEC filings.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1394+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

Where SEC EDGAR gives you raw filings, Alpha Vantage gives you cleaned-up structured data ready for analysis: income statements, balance sheets, cash flow, key ratios, recent earnings, technical indicators. For real-time-ish quotes during market hours, this is the source.

Common flows:

• Quote. "Where's AAPL trading?" → av_quote({symbol: "AAPL"}) → latest price, change, volume.

• Income statement. "Apple's last 4 quarters of revenue/income." → av_income_statement({symbol: "AAPL"}).

• Earnings. "When does NVDA report next?" → av_earnings({symbol: "NVDA"}).

• Daily price history. "AAPL 1-year history." → av_daily({symbol: "AAPL"}).

Used by the fintech_company_deep_dive compound for the quote + income statement layer alongside SEC EDGAR.

Related MCP server: Alpha Vantage MCP Server

Auth

Free tier: 25 requests/day, 5 per minute, real key required. Get one in 30s at https://www.alphavantage.co/support/#api-key. Pass via _apiKey.

The "demo" key: Alpha Vantage advertises demo as a no-signup key, but it returns errors for most calls. Always use a real key — the gateway will surface the demo-key error if you forget.

Higher tiers ($50–250/mo) lift the daily cap and unlock real-time quotes (vs. 15-min delayed on free tier).

Update cadence

• Quotes: real-time on paid tiers, 15-minute delayed on free, market hours only

• Daily / weekly / monthly history: end-of-day, refreshes after market close

• Fundamentals: refreshes within ~24h of new SEC filings

• Earnings: refreshes after each company reports

Pipeworx caches with TTLs aligned to these.

Common pitfalls

• Free-tier 5/min limit. Bursting fails. Pace agent calls or upgrade.

• Symbol vs ticker. Mostly the same on Alpha Vantage, but a few non-US tickers need a suffix (e.g., BARC.LON). Default endpoints assume US-listed.

• "Real-time" definition. Free tier is 15-min delayed end-of-day-style snapshots. For algo trading, you want a paid tier. For agent research, free is fine.

• Earnings calendar isn't always accurate. Companies move report dates; Alpha Vantage updates eventually but sometimes lags by a day or two.

• Adjusted vs unadjusted prices. Daily-adjusted returns split- and dividend-adjusted closes; daily returns raw closes. For long-horizon analysis you almost always want adjusted.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "alphavantage": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/alphavantage/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway for access to all 1394+ data sources:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Alphavantage data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT