Project: Import Stocks With a Shortcut

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to build a Stocks watchlist from a list of stocks.

The Stocks App on your Mac, and also your iPhone and iPad, allows you to create your own watchlist. Here is am in the Stocks App and I could click on the More Button here, create a new watchlist and I can give it a name. Maybe I want to track the stocks that are in my retirement account or some other trading account or just companies that I'm interested in. Then it will prompt me to add stocks to it. So I can type the name of a company or a stock symbol like this and go down here and add the proper stock. Then I can see the Watchlist with the stocks in it. I can switch to the default list or this special list that I've created. 

To add more all you need to do is search for the stock, like this, and then add it. It will add it to the current list that you have selected here. So you can keep building the list. Which is fine except that sometimes that may take a lot of work. If you have a long list of stocks, say one that you've downloaded from an article or taken from a spreadsheet or one that you've taken from your online account, it could take a while to search for and enter in every single stock to create this watchlist. But you can use shortcuts to make this easier. 

So this is going to be a one-time use shortcut. It's not something we need to run all the time. So it's not really an automation that's going to make our work easier every day. It is just something we're going to use once to build a stocks watchlist and maybe keep it around in case we want to create another watchlist later. 

I'm going to use the Plus Button here at the top of the Shortcuts App to start a new shortcut. I'll name this Import Stocks to Watchlist. The first thing I want to add is a Text Action. This just allows me to just find text here. So I can create a list of stocks. Now these can be comma separated, like this, and I can do it that way. Or maybe it's a list that has a different stock on every line. The idea here is you're going to be getting this list from somewhere and pasting it in. Maybe you need to edit it down. There's other information here. Maybe you do that in TextEdit before pasting it in here. But you end up with just this simple list of stocks. It would be great to really quickly import that into a watchlist.

The next thing we're going to do is we're going to look for the Split-Text Action. We're going to add that and it is going to immediately connect to this Text Action here. So it is going to split this text by, in this case new lines is exactly what we want. So if it was comma separated we would click here and we would choose Custom and then use a comma as the separator. We now have what should be the a list of these stocks. We can run this now to test it and we'll see that it does give us a list. You can see each stock is in a separate item there. So now what we want to do is repeat through all of them. So, I'm going to search for Repeat and use Repeat With Each. I'm going to add that here. Since I added it next it's going to immediately connect with the split-text and take that as what to repeat through. So each what? Each item in this list. If I run this it will actually repeat through each one and return a list. It is basically taking a list and creating a list from it by looking at each one, one-by-one. We want to do something with each item as it goes through this. 

What we're going to do is we're going to search for Stocks and we'll find there is an item here for Add Symbol to Watchlist. That's exactly what we want. I'm going to drag this so I can put it inside the repeat loop here. Now this takes two parameters, symbol and watchlist. Let's choose the Watchlist first. Now we can click here and we can actually add the symbol. That's not what we want. What we want to do is Control click, right click, or two-finger click and then we can select the variable or go right to Repeat Item here. It will give us this because it realizes we're in a loop. So, we'll now use that. This should work. Let's go here and see what the other options are. 

Here it will Open the Stocks App every time it does this. It's going to repeat through all of this. We don't want it to open the stocks app necessarily. We just want it to go through and add to this Watchlist. We can now run this and it will work. There's no need to trigger this with Spotlight or put it in the Menu Bar or anything like that because we're just going to run it here in the Shortcuts App. 

Now the thing about the Add Stock to Watchlist Action is that it is going to look for the name of the stock and if it finds any options, like other stocks that start with the same letters it is going to ask us to choose. So it is not going to be an instant add everything. But it will just prompt us and we can go through each stock quickly. 

So I'm going to run this and we can see it's going to come up with the first one in a little dialogue. It is just going to have a lot of stocks that start with T. But, the first one is the one we want. It is the closest match. We can click there and click Done. Or, better yet just double click here. Then it is going to go to the next one. We'll make sure we get the right selection for each one of these. So we can quickly go through all of these. Once it is done with the list we can go back to the Stocks App. Sure enough, for this watchlist it's added all of these stocks. 

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So this could just be a handy shortcut to have around. We can actually make it a little bit better by doing less. So I'm going to get rid of this textbox here. Where it says Split Text I'm going to Control click, right click, or two-finger click here. Then choose Ask Each Time. So it is going to ask for text when you run this. Then it is still going to repeat through the items in that text. Then it is going to add the Repeat Item to which Watchlist? Well, I can Control Click here and for variables I could also say Ask Each Time. Now, for some reason, it resets the first parameter when you change that one. So I'm going to go back in here and make sure I reapply this. So keep an eye on that!

Now one other change I want to make is because when I run this, it is going to prompt for text is going to be one line. So what I want to do is I am going to split not by new lines, but by a custom character and do a comma like that. So now this shorter Shortcut here can be run and I can enter somethings in and I've used commas to separate them, no extra spaces in there. So it should repeat through these and it is going to ask which one do I want. I'll say this one. Then which Watchlist to add it to. So now I can choose the Watchlist. So if I've got multiple Watchlists I can select which one to use for every stock. That's handy in and of itself. I kind of like the original version better because I can work on the text there that has each stock in it and it's only going to use one Watchlist. I can set that and then just go. But this version has its uses as well. Here you can see those new stocks have been added to this Watchlist. 

So once you're in here you can, if you want, easily manage your Watchlist. When you do so you can add new ones and remove old ones. You can rearrange the order that stocks are in here. You can also go to Edit, Watchlist with the More Button. The cool thing about Watchlists that makes it even more useful is that whatever Watchlist you're in, if you look at the News stories on the right you'll notice those stocks appear there. So you can have a watchlist that's purely there so you can keep track of News involving those companies, not necessarily the stock price. 

So, I hope you found this shortcut's project useful. If not for this exact purpose, for the skills that you may have gained to help you with other shortcut's projects. Thanks for watching.