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A note before we begin: This is the seventh lesson in a 16-lesson experiment. I am doing every lesson alongside you, on the same tools, with the same constraints. Some lessons will land cleanly. Some will lead to dead ends and need rework. We’ll figure out what works, together.
If you are catching up, here’s what came before today’s lesson:
Intro: Build Your Own Investment Idea Engine
Lesson 1: How LLMs Work, and How to Defend Against Hallucinations
Lesson 2: Prompt Patterns That Outperform Casual Prompting
Lesson 3: Tools, Agents, and Structured Output
Lesson 4: SEC EDGAR, the Primary Source
Lesson 5: FRED Macro and Sector Data, the Free Read
Lesson 6: FMP API Key and the First Checked Data Pull
Why This Matters for Investors
The first half of today is about resilience. No investor should be one vendor away from a broken workflow, and the public web offers a surprisingly deep bench of free or low-cost data sources that fill in around EDGAR, FRED, and FMP. An API quota changes, a free tier shrinks, a website redesigns away the page we relied on, or a provider gets acquired and shifts its terms. None of these events is catastrophic on its own, but each is enough to break a workflow on a Friday afternoon. Knowing the next two or three credible places to get the same number, in roughly the same shape, is the difference between a one-hour detour and a research week lost.
Format literacy matters for a different reason. The engine we are building is a small system that hands data from one tool to another (Perplexity Computer to Claude, Claude to a Google Doc, a Google Sheet to a script). Each handoff has a preferred format. CSV is the right answer when we want to open something in a spreadsheet and sort it. JSON is the right answer when a script or an agent will read it next. Markdown is the right answer when an LLM will read it next, or when a person will.
Let’s launch into today’s lesson.
