Track a stock or asset with OpenClaw

Watching a handful of tickers is more annoying than it should be. Either you keep an app open and glance at it all day, which wears on your attention, or you let it slide and then scramble to remember where something was last week. The apps show you a number right now, but most of them do not keep a dated history with your own notes attached, the kind of record you can reason about later. And the tools that do keep that history tend to charge money.

Your Operator.io agent can take the boring part off your hands. You send it one prompt, and it stands up a spreadsheet that logs the price of whatever you are watching once a day, then sets up an automation that checks the prices, writes them down, and tells you in your channel how things moved. When a price crosses a line you drew, it says so.

How it works

You send the stock tracker prompt, and the agent sets up the log and the daily check around it:

• It creates a CSV in its workspace with the date, ticker, price, daily change, and a notes column that is yours to use, and the file opens in any spreadsheet and travels with OpenClaw's files.
• Once every 24 hours it looks up the latest price for each asset on your watchlist and writes one row per asset.
• If it already logged an asset today, it updates that row instead of stacking a duplicate, so the file stays one clean entry per asset per day.
• It then messages you where each one stands and how it moved, leading with anything that crossed an alert level you set.

A year of daily closes for the things you care about becomes a record you keep rather than a chart you can only glance at inside someone else's app. You can change or pause the daily run from the Automations page in your dashboard.

One thing worth being straight about: the prices it pulls are the latest published quotes it can find on the web, which for free sources are usually delayed by around 15 minutes on US exchanges. FINRA's Market Data Center notes that equity quotes on its free portal are delayed as required by the data provider, and Investopedia's definition of real time quotes explains that live market data is a paid product sold by the exchanges.

That delay is fine for a daily log and for alerts you act on over hours or days. This is a record keeper, and it does not tell you what to buy or sell. The decisions stay yours.

The prompt

This is the instruction the agent acts on:

Be my stock and asset tracker. Create a spreadsheet in your workspace, a CSV
with columns for date, ticker, price, daily change, and notes. Once a day, look
up the latest price for each asset on my watchlist and add one row per asset, and
if there is already a row for that asset and date, update it instead of writing a
duplicate. Set up an automation that runs this every 24 hours and messages me
here with where each one stands and how it moved that day, calling out anything
that crosses an alert level I set. Before you start, ask me which tickers or
assets to track, what price levels should trigger an alert for each one, and what
time of day you should run the check.

Instead of typing it out, you can send this prompt to your agent straight from the prompts library.

Using it day to day

After setup, the agent comes to you at the time you picked with a short read on your list: each ticker, where it landed, and how far it moved since the day before. If something tripped one of your alerts, that line is the one it leads with. The rest of the time you can ignore it.

Everything you set at the start is something you can change by asking. Add a new ticker to the watchlist, drop one you stopped caring about, move an alert level after a stock has run, switch the check to twice a day around earnings, or ask for a Friday summary of the week. Because the history lives in a file the agent controls, you can also ask it to work the data: how a position has moved this month, which name on your list had the worst week, or what the average price of something was across the last thirty entries. It answers from the CSV it has been keeping rather than guessing.

The notes column is where you attach context the price alone cannot carry. "Watching because of the product launch next quarter." "Alert at $45, will trim half the position there." "Earnings on March 12, check twice that week." When you look back at the file six months later, those notes tell you why you cared, which a chart in a finance app never records.

Where the prices come from

Your agent looks up quotes on the web rather than connecting to a broker. That means it draws from the same public sources anyone can access: finance portals, exchange data pages, and free API endpoints. Yahoo Finance is the default mental model for most people, and it remains the most common free source for quick quotes on US and international equities, ETFs, and indices, though Yahoo does not offer an official API and third party tools that scrape its pages can break when the site changes layout.

For structured data, Alpha Vantage offers a documented REST API with endpoints for daily, weekly, and monthly price history, technical indicators, and fundamentals. The free tier allows 25 API requests per day at five per minute, which is enough for a handful of tickers checked once daily but tight if you are polling intraday. Real time and 15 minute delayed US market data on Alpha Vantage require a paid plan starting at $49.99 a month.

Alpaca's market data documentation describes a similar split: free users get live data from the IEX exchange only, while full SIP feed data covering all US exchanges requires a paid subscription.

If you already have an API key for Alpha Vantage or another data provider, tell the agent to use it and store the key in your instance secrets. The prompt does not require one; the agent can read prices from public web pages by default.

The tradeoff is accuracy versus convenience. A dedicated API returns structured JSON with a known delay policy. A web page scrape works on any ticker Yahoo or Google Finance displays, including some international exchanges and crypto pairs that free APIs omit.

For crypto, the agent can track pairs like BTC/USD or ETH/USD from public exchange pages or coin data sites. For commodities, it can log gold, oil, or index levels the same way. The watchlist is whatever you name, not whatever one app happens to support.

Setting alerts that matter

Alert levels work best when they reflect a decision you would actually make. "Tell me if AAPL drops below $180" is actionable. "Tell me if AAPL moves" is noise. Set levels at prices where you would buy, sell, trim, or revisit your thesis. If you are watching a stock ahead of earnings, set a tighter band for the week before the report and relax it after.

Market hours matter for daily checks. US equities trade on weekdays from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern, with extended hours before and after. A check that runs at 6:00 AM Eastern captures the previous day's close. A check at 5:00 PM Eastern captures the final regular session price. Tell the agent which you prefer. For international tickers, note the exchange so the agent knows when that market is open.

Dividends, splits, and ticker changes can make a price series look like it jumped or crashed when nothing fundamental happened. When a split occurs, ask the agent to note it in the notes column and adjust your alert levels accordingly. When a company changes its ticker symbol, update the watchlist row.

Why a spreadsheet beats another finance app

A watchlist app like Yahoo Finance is good for a quick glance, and it is free, but it shows you the present and not much of your own past, and it only tracks what it supports. The dedicated portfolio trackers fix the history problem and charge for it. Sharesight is the common one, and its plans stack up like this:

That is reasonable if you want tax reporting, dividend tracking, and broker syncing across 200 supported brokers. It is a lot if all you wanted was a dated log of five tickers and a nudge when one of them dips.

The agent fills the space between those two. Its log is a CSV that belongs to you, with a notes column for the context an app never captures, like why you started watching something in the first place. It tracks anything you can name, a stock, an ETF, a crypto pair, a commodity, even a single fund, across whatever public source returns a price. And it adds no monthly line item that grows with your watchlist, since it runs on the OpenClaw you already pay for. If you have been bouncing between a free watchlist for the glance and a spreadsheet you keep forgetting to update, this does both, and it keeps itself current.

To start, open the prompts library and send the stock and asset tracker to your agent. It asks which tickers to watch and where to set your alerts, then the daily readout arrives in whatever channel you already use.