---
title: Ingest Company data from the SEC with Ruby
slug: ingest-company-data-from-the-sec-with-ruby
published_at: 2021-04-14 17:00:16 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:18 +0000
summary: 
description: Importing Company Entity data from the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's open Edgar API. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [Import Company data from the SEC with Ruby, ruby on rails, ruby on rails tutorial, ruby, rails, sec_query, sec_query gem, Security and Exchange Commission, US SEC, Programming, learn to code, SEC Edgar, Edgar API, Edgar index, SEC Edgar index, master.idx]
views: 478
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/ingest-company-data-from-the-sec-with-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNcdSb_vUuA
youtube_id: bNcdSb_vUuA
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/bNcdSb_vUuA
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bNcdSb_vUuA/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Ingest Company data from the SEC with Ruby

*Published: April 14, 2021*
*Views: 478*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNcdSb_vUuA)

[![Ingest Company data from the SEC with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bNcdSb_vUuA/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNcdSb_vUuA)

## Description

Importing Company Entity data from the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's open Edgar API.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

what's up welcome back everyone today what we're going to work on is ingesting sec filings directly from the edgar system we're actually going to use a ruby gem called sec query this is a rubygem for querying the us security and exchange commission and will include filings for form fours which is when an insider so someone who is a has like a chief executive or a president title or they're they own more than 10 of the company or they're somehow really involved with the company in those scenarios that person has to like tell the sec when they buy or sell stock in a publicly traded company and so we can find that information from the sec and uh what we're gonna do today is use this this sec query gem to just like pull those those filings and then uh with the goal of saying like let's analyze every filing and try to figure out if there might be some sort of like non-material information that like rides that gray line and uh yeah the end goal being that we want to get a notification when interesting trades are happening we also want to build it so that like we can put some little flags onto this stock chart for when trades are happening like when buys are happening and sales are yeah purchases and sales are happening for stocks so let's start off by installing this rubygem okay so in our gem file here at the bottom i'm just going to say gem scc query bundle install and hopefully it works look at that okay fantastic that's great all right so the next thing we want to do here is uh let's just experiment so we can just pull up the rails console and see if we can get these recent filings like this so i'm just going to run it and then say filings oh my gosh look at that so uh interest like crazy crazy simple so filings dot first is gonna be this filing it has a oops um it's a the term is for it gives you the cik which again i believe should be like the identifier potentially for the company and then it gives us the link to the raw text so if we click on that then we see the form four's text file which includes sort of uh it's it's kind of like like an xml document it's an sec document uh but yeah it's it's generally pretty messy to try to work with this um and so my hope is that there's some sort of tools within this that will allow us to fetch the details for a specific filing so it gives you this these different uh this different data okay requires a block returns the most recent filings um okay uh let's see so that doesn't get us that doesn't get us too far actually right like it just tells us here's all the different filings um can we how can we is there a way we can filter this uh filing that recent so let's take a look at the uh filing thing here and we have a recent okay start count limit fetch so this is really just like grab me grab the most recent x filings we can filter by sick or by date or filings for an index where we give it an index of a bunch of things for index row this gives us back a new filing thing okay is there a way to get the content for a filing parse uh let's see so yeah that just gives us back the okay so the file link what other stuff is in here filing detail so we could fetch uh accepted date period of report axis number document count format all right so i don't think this is going to get us very far but this will at least tell us like what the filings were um and then is this cik that we're getting back so this one here is this the company's oh central index key there we go okay so is this the okay it looks like it might be the central index key for the company which is great so what we can do now i believe is uh create companies where that central index key doesn't already exist and then we need to figure out how to get how to get more information about the entity so if we were to say like company dot create cik is equal to that and then now that we have the cik is there a way that we can find more information about it uh let's see so then we pass that in okay so that's the name what we're looking for here is the ticker or like this the trading symbol um state of incorporation the location the name is this actually a publicly traded company i'm not familiar with uh with this business igm biosciences let's see if this is a publicly traded company igm biosciences is traded igms so is igms on here gms there is no igms so if we were to okay so if we were to find this one does this have um the trading symbol it does not so how do we determine the trading symbol from the alright so it seems like based on this github issue which actually shows how to go from a ticker to us to a cik includes this like helpful comment from 2019 that says there is some file called ticker.txt that's on sec.gov that has a list of tickers with presumably some cik information so the one that we were just looking at right like this cik that we were just looking at i'm sorry yeah so if we were to copy just that number can we find it in this list we do and igms is there okay so this is pretty sweet what i'm curious now is should we just download this file and make a mapping or should we hit this endpoint periodically or yeah let's make a let's make a job rails g job um update tickers ticker mapping or something update tickers and we'll just call it update tickers so this will be a job which um what's it gonna do so it's gonna like fetch the tickers from this website and update the uh like internal rep so let's go create a model we'll create a model that's called uh ticker mapping or something like that rails g model ticker ticker to sick gosh ticker sick sick ticker uh ticker sick and it's gonna have a ticker and it's gonna have a sick and that's it all right uh okay create ticker six and we want these to be uh null false on both and we do want an index add index to ticker six so this in this case we want um every single entry to be unique we want every single ticker to be unique so we can say ticker unique true and sick unique true and then we also want the combination of ticker and sick to be true or to be unique um and so what this buys this is a couple different things right so this makes sure that it is unique for the whole table right so we can't have the same ticker in there twice we can't have the same sick in there twice but then in addition we can't have the same sicker and tick combo in there twice um and furthermore it'll be really fast to look up given the ticker or given the sick so this will this should be super super handy actually so let's see rails db migrate and then going back to our update tickers job we are gonna make this say something like we're not gonna take any arguments we're gonna say rest client dot this thing i don't know if we have rest client installed yet but that should be pretty simple to install and then we're going to say tickers or like mapping is equal to this thing and then we're going to say like mapping dot each do ticker sick and we're going to say is there a ticker sick dot find ticker is equal to ticker or find or create bang ticker and stick maybe i think that might work this mapping when it comes back right like this format is not going to be deserialized correctly so we're going to need to mess around with this a little bit but um let's okay so let's go to our gem file install rest client so gem rest rest i think it's rest client like this now i can never remember risk client used to be like rest dash client and then it changed and then i can't remember yeah so if we say uh require well i don't know if we need to require it but um let's just drop in by bug and say we've already got a rails console over here reload and update tickers job.perform perform now all right next and [Music] current what is this uninitialized constant rest client okay so i think yeah we need a bundle install rest client is not found is it maybe it's dash maybe it's oh gosh rest client uh rest dash client okay let's see if that works bundle install okay that seemed to work rail c open up the rails console and then we wanted to run update tickers job.perform now and next uh what is this performed update ticker's job uh undefined local variable or method mapping i mean we're trying to create it right now right why is that that's really odd local variable or method mapping undefined local why let's see mapping okay i'm just going to run this line in rails console and say mapping.body okay so it's split on okay so mapping dot body dot split on new lines that should give us each individual one and then we want to map that to x dot split on this time we're going to do it on slash t cool so we want to get um yeah let's just do it all we'll do it all in like one chain so we'll say dot body dot split on new lines dot map that over the pair which is going to be pair dot split on tabs and that should give us our mapping and then we want to iterate over each of those and i think we can destructure that like this and then we'll find or create so let's just reload this and give it a shot and see what happens uh find or create by finder create bang finder create buy let's see reload love that you can just kind of like guess what the method might be in rails uh this looks super promising right like tons of stuff is happening how big is this file it's a pretty big file uh who knows who knows how long this is but it looks like i mean it downloads pretty quickly so now we're just waiting for like all of the writes to the database which are taking i don't know if we slow it down 0.4 milliseconds so i don't know how many um how many rows we have here but it looks like it did finish eventually no it didn't so let's just while we're waiting for oh gosh look at that that cik already exists great okay so we didn't we didn't end up getting bad data so g-o-o-g-l and g-o-o-g are both mapped to this same cik ah gosh i wonder if they even know that all right so is berkshire gonna have two of the same also it is okay so hmm what does this mean this means that the same cik can point at two different tickers so then we're gonna have to figure out which of the two tickers we care about or which ones we think are the right one um okay so how might we do that we're probably gonna have like a preferred ticker or something um i guess that would mean that each company could technically have two or like multiple tickers so things are gonna get real spicy here things are getting spicy okay so what we're saying is this the way that we've modeled our data for ticker sick is invalid a ticker can ha or a sick can have multiple tickers and our company model is also incorrect right because we set it up so that a company has a specific ticker and when we fetch prices we're expecting to fetch prices for a specific ticker so what do we want to do here what do we want to do i think that one thing we could do is just remove the uniqueness constraint on the ticker sick for the cik that would make it so that we could have multiple entries in ticker sick for the same cik and we could continue enforcing that the pair is unique yeah let's do that so let's say rails g migration like allow multiple tickers per sick allow multiple tickers per sick so we want to remove index on ticker 6 for ticker let's see if that works okay so now yeah so i think let's just try re-running our job and see if it crashes while that's going let's uh let's fetch this list locally with curl and just see how long it is so we can use wc-l so this is a word count tool and if we give it dash l that says give tell me how many lines so this tells us there's 11 557 lines recalling that oh gosh violates uniqueness constraint ticker six on sick duplicate key did we remove the wrong one we totally did uh oh gosh okay so let's see rake db roll back yeah because sick should repeat ticker should not repeat gosh allow multiple tickers per six so this should be ticker or should be sick rake db migrate all right yep i did that backwards or incorrectly backwards but yeah i think we're gonna get 11 757 sick mappings okay it looks like we're inserting again and so if we just estimate that it's like three milliseconds per we take this okay times point three so it should take like three seconds all right sweet okay so now if we say like ticker sick dot first we get a combo that looks legit sick is some number okay so now we should be able to like figure out what the ticker is or the tickers are for a given sick yeah figuring out which one we want to save on the company is going to be interesting but for now let's just grab the first one we'll call it we'll call that good so when we say fetch company prices uh for this fetch company's prices job we're going to give it the id and if there's no how should we do this um yeah we want to backfill we want to like backfill the company information so so what i want to do is is get a list of all the companies that exist on on here so there is like indexes here we go indexes full and quarterly indexes okay so for each year they give you a breakdown and then here they have like the current company.idx and company.idx is a file that looks like oh my gosh it opened in vlc player that's not what i want okay so okay so it looks like this and what does it have it has the name of the company their cik the form type and then the date it was filed and then a link to the form or the filing um okay but some of these are also like not form fours uh okay so that is company we've got a form we've got a master so knowing which one of these is important is challenging so if we look at kind of just like the file sizes right the master one looks like it's the biggest 493 kilobytes um so if we were to download this one and then take a look at that what does that have uh master.idx okay similarly it has the sick then the company name then the form type the date it was filed okay so what's interesting about this is okay so it looks like these might just be the cik and then the company name which feels pretty good so okay so how do we want to do this i'm kind of wondering if we should try to backfill like a few years like maybe three or four of these years we go back and try to find all of these master let's see quarter one quarter two if we go to like 2020 and go to quarter four we see this master idx file which oh wow so that's that's pretty decent size and these i think we can just like write a little a quick script to download all of these master idx files and then iterate over them and backfill the companies so let's let's do that let's do that um so we're going to build a script here yeah because we need to we need to figure out like how to read in all these master idx files all the index files so let's say we're going to make another job rails g job like backfill companies yeah backfill companies that's what it's called backfill company's job and what is it going to do it's going to say 2020 we'll give it a year um and then we're going to say quarter because it has like in the url there's a 2020 and then there's a quarter so we'll say like one two three four but like to start let's just give it a one dot each do quarter and so the url that we're reading is going to be this thing okay slash master.idx okay and again we can just use rest client um rest client.get and we'll pass in this thing and then we'll replace this with uh here and we'll replace this with quarter and that should give us back the index uh or and then we want to call like uh yeah i guess dot body dot split on new line and this should give us like again if we were to like list out um if we were to list out the rows then each of the rows we need to like split on pipe or something so yeah we need to look at this data again so okay so we want to like skip everything up to i think up to this line so we can probably just like say give me we need to like find the index of that thing all right so this is going to be fun we're going to be messing with some strings with some strings here so let's see backfill company's job all right so we're going to say uh rows or like filings or something is this and yeah so we'll split and we'll break on there and the yeah we'll just grab the first quarters the first quarter 2020s filings and take a look so if we have we have rails console here we're gonna let's jump back into it and then try to run this perform now 403 forbidden are we not allowed to just make a get request to that how is that okay so this is the url to which we're trying to open yeah and it downloaded fine from the browser so what is filings it should be a massive array okay it is it's a humongous array which is cool that's what we want filings dot first filings oh i we broke out of it okay let's grab it again just like this and drop it in here uh year is 20 20 quarter is one and so filings dot drop let's see filings dot first is this row filings dot so we want we want to like remove the first n rows where i think n might be predictably okay so let's see like find so we want to use the find method to say like give me the first row where l dot starts with uh like a whole bunch of dashes and maybe find index so find index 10 so that gives us that should give us like where we need to trim off so then if we did like filings dot drop 10 then filings okay so we want to do okay so after we have these filings we want to find the index of the row that like tells us where the header is so header index is filings.find index of the like row where the road starts with a whole bunch of dashes and then we want to say filings equal filings.drop header index plus one because we want to drop the first few rows until that header index and now we should have each of the filings and now we want to say something like so filings equals filings.drop 11. and now we need to figure out how we're going to actually like work with each of these so now we can say like filings dot map ff.split on pipe and okay so that's going to take a second because there's a humongous list okay and now we have the cik then we have the name of the company and we have whatever type of form it is and then the date it was filed and then the filing so one thing that we could do is exclude non-form 4 filings or non-form 4 companies i don't think it matters too much so what did we what did we do we said yep so let's say filings dot drop dot map to where filing dot split on pipe that should give us um each of these and again like we really only need i guess we yeah we need the first and second things for sure that's like the company cik and company name um so i'm kind of wondering if we want to say split on pipe and then drop like uh or like dot take two or something so that we only get like the first two elements which will make like our the size of the data we're working with smaller and uh okay so yeah let's do that dot take two um and then we can like probably just make it unique or like yeah let's make it unique so dot unique maybe i don't know i'm not actually sure how that uniqueness works on arrays hey it looks like it totally worked okay so uh dot let's see dot unique and then we want to iterate over all of these each do um cik and name and for each for each of those we want to create a new company right or we want to like check to see if we have that company in the database already so we can say company dot find or create by cik is cik name is name i guess ticker we can set the ticker too by looking up the ticker is equal to ticker sick dot find sick find by sick is sick or i guess where because there could be multiple ticker six with that same sick and then we'll just grab the first one and then we'll use that as our ticker okay so i think this might actually do stuff we'll see so the hope is that we are going to we're going to hit the edgar uh the edgar index we're gonna download this master index which has the list of all the filings and then we are going to uh split on newline we're gonna remove the header and then we're going to iterate over all the filings um and for each of the unique filings we're going to look up the ticker and then we're going to find the company and run it through this thing so this this is the kind of thing where i would definitely start to write tests because like there's we just wrote a ton of code without confirming like anything about it um and i guess we're being kind of willy-nilly we're just playing around here so it doesn't really matter too much all right so we'll just say backfill companies job.perform now and okay so it downloaded that and then if we say continue see company dot count three three three three three three so it's not actually doing anything so company dot last what did it okay so company company.last.destroy um all right so what what's actually happening i don't know why why it didn't work so let's let's put a a breakpoint like here and reload and then rerun it so it seems like i'm getting a 403 like every so often it's not every single time but it's frequent uh okay so what did we what happened here undefined method ticker for nil class okay so one of the things that i saw was that some of these ciks are um zero padded like they have zeros in the beginning but our ticker sick thing ticker sick first like none of these six have padding they don't have any zeros in the front so that's going to mess us up is that we do we have two we have inconsistent format for these ticker and sick things so i'm wondering if we should either go through and prefix all of these with zeros like pre like pad them until they match uh pad them until they match whatever this oh gosh so let's find let's find a specific one so well for instance uh com yeah so apple right so if we grab this cik and we would jump it in here the all of the docs for apple show the cik as being uh zero zero zero zero so four zeros and then the cik right um let's see form four okay so none of those let's see see how that is padded with four zeros i think we might want to do that so but look at this so the sick up here doesn't have four i don't know like which one is the correct one i don't know uh okay so i'm thinking since we already have ticker six set up let's just take the cik at this point convert it to an integer convert it back to a string and then use it so we'll say like cik.2i.2s 2i.2s 2i.2s not my favorite but it might work i don't know let's also put a buy bug in here so that we can see theoretically the issue was that it wasn't finding or yeah it wasn't finding that cik right so we think sick so the cik there is that now do we have ticker sick dot where sick is sick first dot ticker nick okay um next next e hm okay if ticker dot nil by bug reload so the error is that uh it's saying that there's no method ticker for nil class oh i guess okay so i put it in the wrong spot so this is gonna say okay so we're re-running our job and we're expecting that we're gonna hit by bug and we did okay so the cik in this case is this number and ticker sick dot where cik is cik is empty so this giant list that we thought was going to have all of our answers does not have our answers darn all right so this cik does not exist uh in that list let's try to figure out who which company this is uh kingdom capital management uh is this like a hedge fund or something quarterly report was filed 13 fs so they did file a form four um and i think okay so it looks like they filed a form for but they were the pers they were the reporting person they weren't the like actual company so let's let's take let's take a step further back here and look at uh filings okay that's too much no filing stuff yeah okay so i think what's happening is that might not be a filing we care about or that might not be an entity that we care about and so we don't actually want to create a company for that so let's just say if it's not nil we'll create the company and then we might we might lose some data here but again i don't care okay all right reload yeah if it's not nil right so if the ticker if we're able to find the ticker in our like look up then we are going to just take the first ticker symbol for that ticker for that given sick and then we'll create companies off of it and duplicate key violates unique constraint cik already exists so so we can just find it find by find it by the cik find or create by cik and then update it okay it looks like we're making companies now so if we were to go back over here to our index look at that humongous list of companies so if we click on nick nothing is there nicholas financial scco nothing there back to all companies and yeah massive massive list right okay so this is fantastic this is gonna give us a list of companies um like yeah so sgmo cool uh nsp cool whatever right so at least we're gonna have a back filled list of companies this is this is great in the next episode what i think we want to do is actually start fetching those filings and when we look at the most recent filings we'll be able to tell which companies they were for and then in order to obey that alpha vantage stock apis rate limits we only want to fetch the prices for a company sort of on demand and when it matters for the filings that are happening so form four filings might be pretty far few and far between for smaller companies if if the market cap is less than 500 500 million or um even less than like a billion right like the the number of times that filings are going to be popping up on the sec's radar are pretty small and so it should be totally fine to fetch the prices for a company when we know about a new filing so why don't we do that next um so yeah i guess like if we had if we had a really high rate limit api where we could fetch company prices then it wouldn't matter we could just go back fill all the prices for all of these companies separately we could just go fetch all of the prices for all of these companies on like a slow cadence where it's like okay we'll fetch five per minute and we'll just let it run for like several days until we figure out how how many prices we actually need instead what yeah i think i think the best approach here is to is going to be to only fetch the prices for the company when filing happens so we'll do that in the next episode if you stuck with me this long thanks so much for watching i really appreciate it and yeah we will head into the next episode where our goal is going to be to grab recent filings and free fetch prices for companies where we haven't recently fetched the prices for it so join me over there in just a bit thanks

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