--- title: Fetch company data from Alphavantage API with Ruby slug: fetch-company-data-from-alphavantage-api-with-ruby published_at: 2021-05-07 17:00:20 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:15 +0000 summary: description: alphavantagerb #rails #rubyonrails tags: [] views: 1267 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/fetch-company-data-from-alphavantage-api-with-ruby youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSlICEGVZyc youtube_id: MSlICEGVZyc embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/MSlICEGVZyc thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MSlICEGVZyc/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Fetch company data from Alphavantage API with Ruby *Published: May 07, 2021* *Views: 1267* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSlICEGVZyc) [![Fetch company data from Alphavantage API with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MSlICEGVZyc/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSlICEGVZyc) ## Description alphavantagerb #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript welcome back what's up everyone in this episode we're going to talk about fetching company overview data uh for specific companies using the alpha vantage api um to get some information like the market cap the name of the company where it's traded some other just like really really you know overview type data so the alpha vantage api provides things like the symbol the exchange the currency the country the sector the industry etc etc and one of the things that i'm really interested in is this market capitalization because when we're looking at insider filings the market cap of the company can tell us a lot so this the bigger the company so if you're thinking about like looking for signals in insider filing so if the uh you know forms are being filed at the sec and those forms are being filed by the ceo of a company and you're looking at a company that is a massive company like ibm you can't even i can't even count like how many what is this billions or whatever yes i think it's like a 127 billion dollar market cap so if the ceo of ibm trades makes a trade and they buy some shares of ibm that trade is going to have some sort of information and then if the ceo of a company that has a way smaller market cap like maybe they have a hundred million or um you know 200 million market cap versus really far into the billions the ceos of those much smaller companies there's a greater chance that a ceo at a much smaller company has visibility over all the projects the direction and kind of has a better sense for where things are going and again the the data from insider intelligence investment intelligence from insider trading uh again this book has some interesting data uh and numbers that it tells about um you know the predictability or like the signal that's involved with the insider trade for companies of different sizes so if you're looking at really massive companies the the signal starts to fade away when you're looking at much smaller companies the signal is really high especially at ipo so if you have a really small company that's 100 million dollar market cap that just ipo'd and the ceo is buying shares at the at ipo that is an incredibly strong signal that the price is probably going to go up and so one of the things we want to do is just pull in this overview data so um today in today's episode we're going to write a little task that will hit the alpha vantage api similar to how we did for prices and then we're going to populate some company data so we already have a company model and in the company model right now we just have a giant json blob with all the prices we have the ticker symbol and we have the name and that's really it so we want to add some more data in here so i just want to like take a look at these at the data that's available in the json blob that came back you'll notice that we have to pass in overview as our function the symbol and then we're going to pass in our api key and we should get back all of these different all these different metrics that we can then explore so if we go take a look at our fetch company prices job we wrote a price service and the price service hits the alpha vantage api with this client what i'm thinking is we might actually just want to reuse the same price service and instead add a new method here called like fetch overview and we'll give it another ticker and again we'll just do something really similar so we're going to say like client dot oh gosh i don't actually know what it's going to look like so yeah why don't we why don't we just drop into rails console and let's pull up the alpha vantage rb um docks because this is the ruby gem that we're using and so there might have overview so i just search for overview it's not there what if we search for um okay so this might be it nope that's hmm so okay let's see if that works so if we say price service dot uh what is it fetch prices right or no dot client so that's going to give us our alpha vantage client and then we want to cd into client let's see and what are the methods that we have here we have um [Music] crypto download exchange request search sector stock verbose if we say stock apple um given one expected zero keyword symbol okay so that gives us back a stock but what is that actually how do we get like the market cap i wonder if this has support for the the market cap uh stock quote we don't want the well do we want the quote no we want we want the overview okay so one other way that we can do this is by looking okay so query query nope all right let's search in the ruby client here for query does it have query it does okay request download is it just request is that it um oh that seems like a more raw thing that maybe is used by a higher level right because this is taking in the url so what if we search for overview let's search for overview no okay so it's not implemented in here as overview so this function overview that's being passed a query so let's just search query again okay so from the client let's say request or yeah is it request request and then the url that we're going to pass in let's say that url is function equals overview and see what we get back it says invalid api calls see the docs okay so oh question mark okay so query question mark and then function equals overview oh and symbol okay so that gives us the whole thing um is that like it seems like this might not have actually been implemented in here but whatever we can we can work with it we can work with it all right so in our price service we're going to add a new method here that is just client.request and we're going to pass in function overview and symbol is equal to ticker and we're going to get back some data and the data is all of this stuff and the thing that we care about is let's pull off the full name let's get like the full yeah so let's say um what do we want to do so that's actually i think we might want to just return that directly from this price service and then in our job we can update the company data all right so let's create a new job so rails g job like fetch company overview and in here fetch company overview job we're going to say price service dot fetch overview for a ticker and this will take in a company id company.find yeah i uh company id and then we'll pass in company.ticker and this is going to give us our overview data and then we want to say like company dot update name and some other stuff and we're going to say like overview data at name i think we have to use that capitalized key because that's what is used here i don't think we need description uh maybe we should pull in the description i don't know one reason why it might be good is if we have a detail page where we're showing all the company data and we hit a company that we don't know anything about we might want to read a little bit about the description of what they do before we make a trade so let's pull that into sure overview data description you might be wondering why don't we just pull all the data in and the reason is that you don't really need it if you're not going to use it so yeah i mean i'm just kind of pulling the stuff that i'm going that i'm planning to use the cik we already have the exchange and the currency and the country and i think we can skip all those because they all should be us and usd given we're pulling from the sec i think sector and industry are interesting let's pull in the sector and the industry overview data sector and overview data industry and what else do we want here nah i don't really care about the address full-time employees is kind of interesting but yeah sure full-time employees so employees overview data for full-time employees um we definitely want the market cap market cap is overview data at market cap and the ebitda p e ratio peg ratio book to value these are all some like really like fundamental things that other folks would look at when they're doing fundamental analysis it might be interesting to compare it when you're looking at this but um yeah i'm just going to skip a lot of these normal like default things and instead i think i'm just going to link out to like google finance for a lot of this but i do want to run some data on the actual against the market cap and against like maybe some of these other metrics so um shares outstanding shares float shares short short prior month the short ratio uh percent insiders i mean that's pretty interesting given it's we're talking about insider so percent insiders and all of this is going to change day to day but we really kind of just need a snapshot like once a quarter or something we don't need to pull this all the time percent institutions that's kind of interesting uh okay let's just stick with this for now and we can always come back and add more later so name description sector industry employees market cap percent insiders we need to add all of these as columns to the company table because right now in the company table oh we already we do have the name we don't have anything else so let's go do that so we're gonna say rails we're gonna say uh rails g migration add over oops uh add overview to data to company and we'll build a little migration that will add this overview data add overview data to the company so we're going to say add column to companies and what are we going to add so the overv job yeah okay so we need to add description this is going to be text add column companies sector this will be text we probably could build like a table of all the sectors and table of all the industries and then like join them and such that's probably like the proper way to do it but i think we can just be sloppy here and drop in the sector and industry directly i think that's fine let's see employees and oops this is going to be employees and this will be an integer and then the market cap and the market cap i don't think we can use integer i think we want to use big hint or something rail's big int can we use a big int uh yeah big hint cool and then add column companies for percent insiders and that's going to be a float i think and we should be good to go so say rails g or rails my rails db migrate that will run the migrations and add those columns to the database cool all right so now if we go to our fetch company overview job if we were to perform this for a specific company we would expect that we hit the alpha vantage api with that company's ticker and then we get back the overview data which we can then use to update the company in the database and then we should just move forward so let's see if we can actually get this to dance for us in rails consoles we'll say reload and then i'll put in the job name perform now for company one and it looks like that might have been a database hit and we've got the name pagerduty we've got a description a bunch of other information so let's pull up company number one in localhost so companies slash one oops slash one pagerduty very cool and we don't have any other data about it but we can add that like here in the sidebar i think it'll be pretty easy to do so let's go do that so company show company show um i think to the left yeah so i don't actually know where this is going to go let's see so we've got company name and company ticker up there and then i've been using tailwind ui so let me go to the tailwind ui and let's see if there's a like a nice data list component that we could drop in or maybe some stats actually let's use stats so there's some cool stats components here maybe we use uh i don't know what should we use well we're going to probably want the description in a p tag so at company.description see what that looks like okay that's the description kind of looks nasty it's like all yeah i really just want it on the side here on the left but i need to figure out how to move this panel so it's like squished to the left or to the right um and then what else do we want we want uh the market cap probably in like one of these sweet i don't know one of these really basic ones so i'm just gonna grab this here and then come back over and dump it in and let's see how that looks and we'll say market cap and we can print out at company.marketcap refresh okay so that looks okay but we want it to be like delimited which how does that work again yeah number so number with delimiter number with delimiter is a rails helper that allows you to delimit the number with commas so here we can see that pager duty is a three billion dollar company that is super crazy because they just went public and i think i actually want to grab like a little bit more to make this thing look like not awful because i didn't want it to stretch all the way across so let's see okay nice and then this is like too close to the bottom this refresh prices thing so i'm gonna put um a margin top of six on there scoots that down a little bit and then let's add another another one of these sort of like metrics thingies uh wait dl oh shoot slash dl and then what was the other thing employees and then we'll put like employees so there's 783 employees they have a 3 billion market cap i can't even remember what other data we pulled in all right so let's say bundle exec annotate models and we wait just a second so that oh i mean right here percent insiders employees yeah so percent insiders let's do that one so 8 yyp percent insiders cool 15.255 and then we'll just like put a little percent symbol after it i think that'll look cool all right that is looking pretty sick and i love it so much that's cool all right so we've pulled in some data from the alpha vantage api and that's helping us populate this company view where we can now see the market cap the number of employees the percent insiders so this is exactly what we were setting out to do uh thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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