sql query within contemplate or where?

hi,,

I have a table called stockapi and I would like to display a field from it on a specific content type page,

I tried running a mysql query to suck the info from the table but I always get error messages (the sql code was inserted into contemplate I don't know if this is a good practice)

What I basically want to do is display the current_price of the stock based on the stock symbol.

the stockapi has the following fields
symbol
name
current_price
change_amt
opening
high
low
volume
last_date
last_time
updated

any idea on how to get that information displayed on my page where the stock symbol is identified

thanks for the help