Given a ticker symbol, how can I know the corresponding SEC Edgar's Central Index Key (CIK)?

Question

I read on https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/cik.htm:

The Central Index Key (CIK) is used on the SEC's computer systems to identify corporations.

Given a ticker symbol, how can I know the corresponding Edgar's CIK?

For example, for the ticker symbol AXAHY, searching for AXAHY on https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html returns nothing, and searching for AXA returns many results. I'm not looking for the CIK of AXAHY in particular (which I think is 0000898427), but a principled way to know the Edgar's CIK given a ticker symbol.

Searching for AXA returns many results on https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html:

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 31 '20 at 01:32

1

mainst pointed me to https://sec.report/CIK/, which indeed does the job.

->

answered Jul 31 '20 at 01:32

Franck Dernoncourt

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 31 '20 at 02:14

You can get this directly from the SEC.

In text format: https://www.sec.gov/include/ticker.txt

The first column is the ticker, and the second column is the CIK for that ticker. Sample:
```
a 1090872
aa    1675149
aaap  1611787
aacg  1420529
aach  1606180
aacqu 1802457
aagh  1098009
...
```

In JSON format: https://www.sec.gov/files/company_tickers.json

Sample:

{
    "0":{"cik_str":1750,"ticker":"AIR","title":"AAR CORP"},
    "1":{"cik_str":1800,"ticker":"ABT","title":"ABBOTT LABORATORIES"},
    "2":{"cik_str":1961,"ticker":"WDDD","title":"WORLDS INC"},
    "3":{"cik_str":2034,"ticker":"ACET","title":"ACETO CORP"},
    ...
}

More information about getting EDGAR data: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/accessing-edgar-data.htm

Related question on Quantitative Finance StackExchange: Central Index Key (CIK) of all traded stocks

Given a ticker symbol, how can I know the corresponding SEC Edgar's Central Index Key (CIK)?

2 Answers2