What a 13F is, and what it is not

Institutional investors managing more than $100 million in US-listed equities must tell the SEC what they hold at the end of each quarter, on a form called a 13F. That is the source of every number on this page.

The filing is due 45 days after the quarter ends, and most funds use close to all of it. So the holdings you are reading are a photograph of a portfolio as it stood on the last day of the quarter, published up to six weeks later, and describing decisions taken over the three months before that. A position shown here may have been sold before you read about it.

This is the single most important thing to understand about 13F data, and the reason it is better used to study how an investor thinks than to decide what to buy today.

Each fund is marked with where it stands for the most recently ended quarter. Filed means the 13F is in and the holdings shown are current to that quarter. Expected means it has not arrived yet and the 45-day deadline has not passed, which is the normal state for several weeks after every quarter end.

Overdue means the deadline has passed without a filing. That is worth reading carefully rather than as a scandal: it also covers funds that have wound down, dropped below the $100 million threshold, or simply stopped filing. An overdue marker is a statement about the paperwork, not about the manager.

A 13F covers US-listed equities and similar instruments. It does not show cash, bonds, commodities, foreign listings, private holdings, or short positions. A fund that has sold everything and gone to cash files a 13F that looks like it owns almost nothing, and a fund heavily positioned in bonds or overseas markets can look far smaller here than it is.

Short positions are the sharpest omission. Because only the long side is disclosed, a holding that exists purely as one leg of a hedge is indistinguishable from a genuine bet on the company. Some of what looks like conviction is machinery.

Nor does the form say why. There is no commentary, no cost basis and no target. A new position tells you a fund bought; it does not tell you whether that was a considered thesis or a small allocation from a rules-driven strategy.

The most widely held table is the closest thing here to a signal, because agreement across many independent managers is harder to explain by chance than any single fund's position. Even then it is a starting point for research rather than a conclusion.

Changes are usually more informative than levels. A fund that has held the same company for years tells you less than one opening a position it has never owned, and both are visible in the quarter-on-quarter counts.

And size matters more than presence. A holding worth a fraction of a percent of a portfolio is not a conviction, however famous the manager; the funds worth studying are the ones concentrating.