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

The managers we follow

Stockplus tracks 18 filers rather than the several thousand who file, because a directory ranked by size is Vanguard, State Street and Geode holding the whole market. These 12 are the ones whose book is one identifiable person's decisions.

• Warren BuffettBerkshire Hathaway
• Bill AckmanPershing Square
• SDStanley DruckenmillerDuquesne Family Office
• CCChase ColemanTiger Global
• Seth KlarmanBaupost Group
• DLDaniel LoebThird Point
• PLPhilippe LaffontCoatue Management
• Cathie WoodARK Investment Management
• David TepperAppaloosa
• Paul SingerElliott Investment Management
• AHAndreas HalvorsenViking Global Investors
• MBMichael BurryScion Asset Management

Six more filers are covered without a name attached, because naming one is a claim and these books are not one person's decisions: Renaissance Technologies (the models decide), Citadel Advisors (hundreds of independent pods), Millennium Management (hundreds of independent pods), Bridgewater Associates (Ray Dalio stepped back), Soros Fund Management (run by Dawn Fitzpatrick), Lone Pine Capital (Stephen Mandel no longer manages).

Photographs, via Wikimedia Commons: Warren Buffett by USA International Trade Administration, Public domain; Bill Ackman by Senate Democrats, CC BY 2.0; Seth Klarman by Maryland GovPics, CC BY 2.0; Cathie Wood by Caroline Wood, CC BY-SA 4.0; David Tepper by Appaloosa Management, CC BY-SA 3.0; Paul Singer by World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0. The remaining 6 have no freely-licensed photograph, so they carry their initials rather than a picture of somebody else.

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 issuer name as filed is what Stockplus shows on the row, and the number of unresolved positions and their share of the book are printed above the list rather than hidden. 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.

Institutional holdings in Stockplus

Stockplus is our app, so treat this section as a description rather than a recommendation. The Funds tab shipped: it is in the App Store's 0.0.7 of 5 September 2026 and in the Google Play build of 3 September 2026. This section described it as built-but-unreleased for several weeks before that, which was true when written and stopped being true on release.

It reads the SEC's quarterly Form 13F data sets directly from sec.gov, which is the primary source rather than an aggregator, and puts them in three places. The Funds tab inside Markets opens on nineteen curated managers rather than on the largest filers, because ranked by size a 13F directory is index complexes and nobody opens this feature to read an index fund; every other filer is one chip away. Thirteen of the nineteen are one identifiable person's decisions and carry that person's name. The rest do not, because a systematic book or a firm of a hundred independent pods is not anybody's stock picks.

A row in that list shows the manager's three largest long positions with their weights, the number of positions in the book, its value as filed, and how much of it sits in the five largest holdings. Opening a manager gives the reported book for a quarter, position by position, next to a Changes view that marks what was new, added to, trimmed or exited against the quarter before. On a stock's own screen a separate card names institutions that reported holding it, weighting each one against that filer's own book rather than against the company.

The limits are the form's limits, and the screens say so rather than smoothing them over. Each one is captioned with the quarter it describes and never with today. A standing note repeats that a 13F covers US-listed long equity only, with no shorts, bonds, foreign listings or cash, and that the values are as filed rather than marked to today. Puts and calls are tagged and can be split off from the long book, so an option never sits at the top of a list that reads like an ownership list. Where a CUSIP could not be resolved to a ticker, the position is listed under the issuer name as filed and the screen prints how many such positions there are and what share of the book they are, rather than dropping the rows and quietly misstating every weight around them. The history runs eight quarters back: before 2023 the SEC reported values in thousands, so reaching further would mean reading a column that means something different.

In the build you can install

Shipped on both stores: as of 28 September 2026 the App Store is on 0.0.9, released 24 September 2026, and Google Play is on 0.0.9, released 24 September 2026, and both of those contain it. This bullet replaced a "not in the build you can install" one on 6 September 2026. There is still no automatic pipeline from a merge to a store release, so code landing and a feature arriving on a phone remain separate events; the difference is that this one has now done both.

What the Funds tab contains

A directory of curated managers, each manager's reported book for a quarter with every position's weight, a quarter-over-quarter Changes view, and a card on a stock's own screen naming the institutions that reported holding it. Reading all of it is free, and free without an account, because it is public-domain SEC material.

Free, and the one paid part

Reading costs nothing and following a manager costs nothing. The paid part is being told: a Pro subscriber gets a push when a manager they follow reports a new quarter, which is the only piece of this a reader could not reproduce by opening the app themselves.

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. There is no field for any of them in the API and no way to sort the manager list by return, which is the constraint stated rather than a feature not yet reached.

This is the slowest disclosure we follow. The two that report closer to the trade itself are in the same app. For those, 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 Stockplus 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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