Institutional holdings

13F filings and institutional holdings

A Form 13F is the quarterly report an institutional investment manager files with the SEC when it has discretion over $100 million or more in US-listed securities. It lists the manager's long positions — the security, the share count and the value — as they stood on the last day of the quarter, and is due 45 days later.

Who must file

Managers with discretion over $100M+ in 13(f) securities

How often

Quarterly

Deadline

45 days after the quarter ends

What is disclosed

Security, CUSIP, share count, value at quarter end

What is not disclosed

Short positions, cash, most bonds, foreign listings

Cost to read the filings

Free — the SEC publishes them

What a 13F does not show

This is the part worth reading first, because almost every site that republishes 13F data presents it as though it were a portfolio. It is not. A 13F covers Section 13(f) securities — mostly US exchange-listed stocks, along with certain ETFs, closed-end funds and convertible instruments. Everything else a manager owns is invisible in it.

So a 13F does not show short positions, cash, most bonds, commodities, real estate, private holdings, or anything listed on a foreign exchange. A manager whose US equity book is a tenth of what they run will look, in a 13F, like a manager with a small portfolio. A manager who is net short a stock they also hold long appears simply long.

It is also structurally old. The report describes positions as they stood on the last day of the quarter and is not due for another 45 days, so a filing is between six weeks and four and a half months behind reality on the day it appears. Managers may also apply for confidential treatment to delay disclosure of individual positions, which means even the filed list is not always the complete filed list.

How the filings work

Any institutional investment manager exercising discretion over $100 million or more in 13(f) securities has to file, and the threshold is what makes the population broad rather than exclusive: index complexes, pension funds, banks and insurers all file alongside the hedge fund managers people actually want to read about. Several thousand managers file every quarter.

Two report types matter. A 13F-HR carries the holdings. A 13F-NT is a notice saying the manager's positions are reported in somebody else's filing, and it carries none — which is why a tracker that counts notice filings ends up with managers whose portfolios are permanently empty. Amendments arrive as 13F-HR/A and can add positions, correct them, or remove them entirely.

A 13F is not the only SEC disclosure worth watching, and it is the slowest of them — company officers and directors report their own trades within two business days on Form 4, which is what our insider trading tracker follows.

13D and 13G surface a stake weeks earlier

If you are watching for a manager taking a position rather than reviewing what they already own, the 13F is the slowest way to find out. Crossing 5% of a company's shares triggers a separate filing, and those deadlines are counted in days rather than months.

The distinction between the two is intent. A Schedule 13D is the activist filing: the holder is not passive and may push for change. A Schedule 13G is the passive counterpart, used by institutions that simply own a large stake. A stake that appears on a 13D in the first week of a quarter will not show up in that manager's 13F for another four months.

Schedule 13D

Filed within five business days of crossing 5% with an intent to influence. Material changes are amended within two business days.

Schedule 13G

The passive version. Passive investors file within five business days of crossing 5%; amendments are due within 45 days of the end of a quarter in which a material change happened.

Form 13F

Quarterly, 45 days after the quarter ends, and only for managers over the $100M threshold. The slowest of the three, and the only one that shows a whole US equity book at once.

Why holdings carry a CUSIP and not always a ticker

A 13F identifies each security by CUSIP — a nine-character identifier — plus whatever the filer typed in the issuer name field. It does not carry a ticker. That is a deliberate design of the form and not an oversight, but it has a practical consequence for anyone republishing the data.

CUSIP is a licensed identifier, and there is no free, complete, publishable map from CUSIP to ticker symbol. Building one from public sources — matching issuer names against public company records — works for most large, well-known securities and fails on the long tail: name variants, share classes, delisted issuers, and the many holdings that are not ordinary common stock in the first place.

The honest way to handle that is to say so. Where a security cannot be resolved to a ticker, the filed CUSIP and issuer name are what we would show, and the share of unresolved holdings is something worth publishing rather than hiding. A tracker that shows a ticker for every row has either bought a licence or guessed, and the second one is more common than the first.

How Stock+ shows institutional holdings

Stock+ is our app, so treat this section as a description rather than a recommendation — and today it is mostly a description of something that is not there yet.

The server side of this exists: Stock+ ingests the SEC's quarterly Form 13F data sets directly from sec.gov, which is the primary source rather than an aggregator. What does not exist yet is anywhere in the app to look at it. There is no institutional-holdings screen, no per-manager view, and no alerts on 13F activity. If following named managers is why you are here, a dedicated 13F platform will serve you better today, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.

In the app today

Nothing. Institutional holdings are not yet a feature of Stock+ — the congress and insider feeds are the disclosure data the app does surface.

Being built

Ingest of the SEC's quarterly 13F data sets, as the foundation for a manager-portfolio view.

Not planned

Prices, cost basis, or gain/loss against a holding. A 13F contains none of those, and inventing them from another source is how a filing turns into a performance claim it never made.

For the disclosure data the app does show today, see congress stock trades and the insider filing feed.

Where the data comes from

Directly from the SEC. Every quarter it republishes the machine-readable portion of every 13F filed in that period as a Form 13F data set, and that is what Stock+ reads — no aggregator sits in between, so a parsing mistake is ours to find rather than one we inherit. The filings themselves are on EDGAR and free for anyone to read.

The SEC's own site states that its content may be copied and further distributed without permission, which is why this dataset can be discussed openly here while the market data inside the app cannot. It is also worth stating the obvious limit: the SEC does not verify the accuracy of what managers file. If a row disagrees with the original filing, the filing is right — and nothing on this page is investment advice.

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