How To Track Crypto and More In Numbers and Stocks On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look a using Numbers and the Stocks App to track things other than stocks.

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Now I'm often asked how you can track things on your Mac that aren't necessarily stocks. Things like crypto currency, metals, commodities, special funds, and all of that. There are two main ways you would want to track them. One is in a spreadsheet in Numbers. Another is using the Stocks App. So I'm going to show you the trick that you need to know to track just about anything using Numbers or Stocks. 

First let's start off here in Numbers. Now I'm going to use the basic stock function to track a stock. So first I'm going to put the stock name in here. Be nice and neat about it. Then I'm going to start a formula. I'm going to use the Stock formula. I'm going to select this and then close the parentheses like that. So it should give me the current price for this stock. Now before I hit Return and activate that function I'm going to go over here to the Functions Help. Search for this so I can look up the stock function. Then below I'm going to get tons of information about how to use it. All the different options, examples, and everything. Now what I want you to pay special attention to is all the way at the bottom of this.  It says here, the stock's function is powered by Yahoo Finance. 

So next let's look at the Stocks App. The Stocks App you can have a Watch List here. If you want to just look at a stock one time or add it to your Watch List what you would do is search here. You can search for the name of the company or if you happen to know the symbol you can type that in there. Then you could view the symbol and you could also Control Click on it and say Add To Watch List. So now it would be added to your regular Watch List here. If you're not searching you'll see it here in the List. But I also want you to notice here at the bottom Yahoo Finance once again. So both the Numbers App and the Stocks App are getting their data from the Yahoo Finance's service. 

Let's look at that. Let's do a search here for Yahoo Finance and I'll see that the actual website is Finance.Yahoo.com. When you're here you could see all sorts of financial information and you could also search for a symbol or company name. Then get a current stock price, chart, and everything. So this is where the data comes from for the Numbers App and the Stocks App. So notice here in the URL it says Finance.Yahoo.com quote and then it's got the stock symbol here. So if I could find something in Yahoo Finance and then see what symbol its using I should be able to use that in Numbers and Stocks to get the same value. 

Let's try it, for instance, with Crypto currency. Let's search for Bitcoin. If I search for Bitcoin here I'll see that indeed Yahoo does track that. Here is crypto currency, Bitcoin, in US dollars. You could see the symbol right there. It's BTC-USD. If I select it you could see the symbol now here in the URL. Now let's go into Numbers here and change this and say BTC-USD. Sure enough there's the current value for Bitcoin in US dollars. I could do that for all sorts of other things. For instance if I wanted to know a fund, let's say TROWE technology fund. There we go. There's the symbol for it. I can go to it there and I can grab it out of here. I put that in here and I can get that value. For something like gold. I can search gold here and come up with various different things. GC=F gives me the ComX price. If I take the same symbol from here, paste it into Numbers I get that value. I can search for all sorts of things. You know, here's wheat futures. Here's crude oil, CL=F. 

So the basic idea is if you can find it in Yahoo Finance then you can use it in Numbers. The same thing is true here in the Stocks App. The data comes from the same place. So I could do BTC-USD and there's Bitcoin. Not only do I get the price, I get a chart, I get news, I get everything. There's GC=F for gold. Here's PRGTX. As a matter of fact you don't even have to go to Yahoo Finance if you just search here usually you'll come up with a result here that gets you what you want. Notice how GC=F comes up first when I search for gold. When I search for a fund name you could see I'm able to get that. Sometimes it's a little tricky. Notice if I just search for this I can easily get lost here in the search result. Sometimes searching at the Finance.Yahoo.Com site first is the quickest way to get there. 

Note there's also a little hidden function in Numbers to give you more information as well. Since this is using the Stock function and it's pulling a value from here, anytime I go to Edit this it just edits the function. But if  I were to actually type the name of the symbol in here, let's use Apple for instance like that, with quotes, then if I were to double click on this it actually comes up with this special control. Now you could see here information about the stock. You could see the different attributes and change the function to be something else. So, for instance, I could look at the market cap here and it will change the actual function. You could also see all this other data available really easily. What we can also do in this control is you can double click in the name here and now you could do searches. So I could search for gold. I could search for Bitcoin. I could search for other crypto currency. You could see here I could get the value for that. If I go to Edit this formula I could see exactly what it's doing. It's ETH-USD. There's more crypto currency here as well.

So whatever it is you want to track you should be able to track it in Numbers using Stock or StockH and in the Stocks App as well. You have just got to know the right symbol to access that data and that symbol is always going to match what Yahoo uses. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.