Connect Alpha Vantage to Cursor via MCP

💡 No install? Use cloud.anythingmcp.com directly. Sign in, click Connectors → Alpha Vantage, paste your credentials, mint an MCP API key and you're done. No Docker, no git clone, no local server.

Alpha Vantage + Cursor

Market data from Alpha Vantage: stock quotes and daily or intraday price history for global exchanges, company fundamentals and earnings, dividends, insider and institutional holdings, ETF profiles, options, indices, forex, crypto, commodities, US economic indicators, technical indicators and news with sentiment. Read-only; a free API key allows 25 requests a day.

Prerequisites

See the full setup instructions baked into the connector (visible in the in-app store when you select the connector). The required environment variables for this connector are:

ALPHA_VANTAGE_API_KEY

Step 1 — Get credentials

Setting up takes about a minute. You need an Alpha Vantage API key; the free one only asks for an e-mail address.

1. Claim a free key at https://www.alphavantage.co/support/#api-key.
2. Paste it into ALPHA_VANTAGE_API_KEY. It is sent as the apikey query parameter.
3. Install the connector and run alpha_vantage_get_market_status: it shows which stock, forex and crypto markets are open right now and confirms the key.

Plans: the free key allows 25 requests per day. Premium plans (https://www.alphavantage.co/premium/) raise this to 75 or more requests per minute and unlock realtime US data, intraday history, adjusted daily series, options and bulk quotes. With 25 calls a day the AI picks the one tool that answers the question instead of trying several.

Symbols: US symbols are plain (IBM); other exchanges carry a suffix, such as TSCO.LON, SAP.DEX, RELIANCE.BSE or SHOP.TRT. When the exact symbol is unknown, the AI looks it up first with alpha_vantage_search_symbols.

What it reads:

• Prices: the latest quote of a stock or ETF, realtime quotes for up to 100 US symbols at once (premium), daily, weekly and monthly history with 20+ years, raw or adjusted for splits and dividends, and intraday bars of US stocks at 1 to 60 minutes. Market status worldwide and the day's 20 top gainers, losers and most active US tickers.
• Company analysis: the overview with sector, valuation ratios, margins and analyst target price; annual and quarterly income statements, balance sheets and cash flows; earnings per share with surprises; analyst EPS and revenue estimates; shares outstanding; dividends and splits; insider transactions; institutional holdings; earnings call transcripts since 2010Q1.
• Funds and indices: ETF profiles with holdings and sector allocation, and the history of 200+ market indices such as SPX, NDX or VIX.
• Options (premium): the live US option chain with greeks and implied volatility, or the chain of a past trading day since 2008.
• News: articles about tickers or topics with overall and per-ticker sentiment.
• Currencies and crypto: the exchange rate of any pair, physical or crypto, and daily, weekly or monthly history (intraday on premium).
• Macro: US real GDP, treasury yields, federal funds rate, CPI, inflation, unemployment, nonfarm payrolls, retail sales and durable goods; commodities such as WTI, Brent, natural gas, copper, wheat and coffee; gold and silver spot and history.
• 50+ technical indicators, such as SMA, EMA, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, ADX or ATR.

Data formats: numbers come as strings, often with numbered keys such as "05. price". Time series are objects keyed by date (YYYY-MM-DD) or timestamp, newest first; intraday timestamps are US Eastern time. Fundamentals are in the reported currency (reportedCurrency) and in full units, and "None" means not reported. Daily data is end of day unless a premium entitlement is set. Sentiment scores run from -1 (bearish) to 1 (bullish).

Data volume, no paging: each call returns its whole answer. outputsize compact (the default here) returns the latest 100 points; full can return 20 years. Technical indicators always cover the whole history of the interval, so for long views the AI uses weekly or monthly. For options it sets an expiration to keep the chain small.

Read-only: every tool only reads, so there is nothing to confirm and no tool is switched off at install.

Common errors: Alpha Vantage answers HTTP 200 even on errors; the connector turns these answers into failed calls. A rate limit message means the daily quota (25 on a free key) or the per-minute quota is used up, or calls came faster than about one per second: wait or upgrade. A premium message means the function or option needs a paid plan; bulk quotes on a free key return sample data and fail. "Invalid API call" means a wrong symbol or parameter. 401 means the key was refused.

The connector does not use the CSV-only endpoints (listing status, earnings calendar, IPO calendar) or the advanced analytics endpoints. Alpha Vantage also runs an official MCP server at https://mcp.alphavantage.co.

Step 2 — Install the adapter

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelpCode-ai/anythingmcp/main/docker-compose.quickstart.yml -o docker-compose.yml
printf 'JWT_SECRET=%s\nENCRYPTION_KEY=%s\n' "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env
docker compose up -d

Step 3 — Add the connector in Cursor

Your server URL: in AnythingMCP, open MCP Servers → the server this connector is on, and copy its URL (https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/…). Use it wherever this guide shows YOUR_SERVER_ID.

Cursor reads MCP servers from ~/.cursor/mcp.json. Add this entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anythingmcp": {
      "url": "https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/YOUR_SERVER_ID",
      "headers": { "X-API-Key": "YOUR_MCP_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

1. Create an MCP API key in AnythingMCP under MCP Servers → your server → API keys, and paste it in place of YOUR_MCP_API_KEY.
2. Save the file and restart Cursor.
3. Open Cursor → Settings → MCP and check that anythingmcp is listed and connected.
4. Start chatting: the agent can now call the Alpha Vantage tools.

Available tools

Example prompts

• "What is Apple trading at right now, and how much has it moved today?"
• "Compare the revenue, operating income and free cash flow of Microsoft and Alphabet over the last four fiscal years."
• "Show the daily closes of SAP on XETRA for the last 100 trading days."
• "What is the sentiment of the latest news about NVIDIA, and which articles are most bullish?"
• "How have the US 10-year treasury yield and CPI inflation moved over the last two years?"

FAQ

Does Cursor support custom MCP servers on the free tier? Yes, MCP is available on Hobby, Pro and Business plans.

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