Google Sheets Limits on Historical Market Capitalization Data

Summary

The document asks whether Google Sheets’ GOOGLEFINANCE function can retrieve historical company market capitalization. It reports that the function returns historical share prices for a date range and current market capitalization when requested without dates, but the same date-range approach does not return historical market capitalization. The author wonders whether the data is paywalled or unavailable and asks for alternative sources.

No alternative method or answer is provided, so the document does not establish why the field is unavailable or where to obtain historical figures. Its practical takeaway is limited: users should not assume that support for historical prices means the service also exposes historical market capitalization. Researchers needing historical market-cap data must investigate another data source or construct estimates from historical prices and share counts, with attention to the source and timing of those inputs.

Key ideas

• Historical price queries and current market capitalization are described as working in Google Sheets.
• The document reports that historical market capitalization is not returned through the attempted query.
• It does not determine whether the limitation is due to access restrictions or missing data.
• Researchers are left to seek another source or method for historical market capitalization.

Tags

# Using GOOGLEFINANCE function on google sheets to get historical marketcap


# Using GOOGLEFINANCE function on google sheets to get historical marketcap












I have a question related to accessing historical data. My first attempt to grab historical data for a few companies was using Google sheets and the GOOGLEFINANCE function. Unfortunately, it seems to be fairly limited.

Running this function works very well and I could not be happier:

`=GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL", "price", DATE(2014,1,1), DATE(2014,12,31))`

But running this one, where I replace price with marketcap does not work:

`=GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL", "marketcap", DATE(2014,1,1), DATE(2014,12,31))`

If I remove the dates, I am able to get the marketcap today, but it seems historical marketcap is blocked. Is this behind a paywall or something or do they just not make historical marketcap data available?

Thanks for any help.

Also, if there is another way to get historical marketcap data, please let me know!

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