What a 13F filing contains
Institutional managers exercising discretion over $100 million or more in qualifying US securities file a Form 13F once a quarter. It lists the securities they held on the last day of that quarter, the number of shares, and the market value of each position.
That is the whole of it. A 13F does not report short positions, cash, bonds, commodities, currencies, real assets, or holdings listed outside the United States. A manager with a large position in a foreign-listed company or a substantial cash reserve will show neither here. Nothing on this site is a manager’s portfolio; everything is the reportable slice of it.
What the timing means
Values are as of the last day of the quarter. The filing is due 45 days after that, and managers routinely use most of them. By the time a filing is public, the positions it describes are between six and thirteen weeks old, and the manager may already have sold what you are reading about.
Every quarter on this site names both dates — the period it describes and the day it was filed — because the gap between them is part of the fact. A manager may also amend a filing; an amendment either adds holdings or restates the original, and this site merges amendment groups so a quarter reflects the most recent statement of it.
How securities are identified
A CUSIP identifies a security. A CIK identifies the issuer that files with the SEC. Neither is ever inferred from a company name or a ticker symbol on this site.
This matters more than it sounds. Two share classes of the same company — Alphabet Class A and Class C, for example — carry the same company name and different CUSIPs, and they are different securities that must never be merged. A company also renames itself: the issuer name written into a filing is the name reported on the day of filing, not a current one, so display names come from a central security reference rather than from the filing text.
Where a security’s identity cannot be resolved, it is shown unresolved. A missing ticker stays a missing ticker rather than becoming a plausible guess.
How sectors are derived
Sector assignments on this site are not licensed data. They are derived here, from the Standard Industrial Classification code an issuer reports to the SEC, through a rule set versioned in this project’s source. The sector names and the order they appear in follow the GICS vocabulary, because that is the ordering brokerage statements and index providers already use — but the assignment of a particular security to a particular sector is this site’s own derivation and should not be read as GICS classification.
SIC is a regulatory code the filer chooses for itself, not an economic classification, and it cannot express some distinctions at all. Its clearest failure is code 7389, “Business Services, Not Elsewhere Classified”, under which Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Accenture all report — several payment networks and an IT consultancy sharing one code. No rule can separate them, so they are not separated by guesswork: a security whose sector cannot be resolved is shown as Unclassified and queued for human review.
Some holdings have no issuer sector to resolve at all. Bonds, options, warrants and index products are shown as No Issuer Sector, which is a different statement from Unclassified: there is nothing missing, because there was never an issuer sector to find.
When a sector view is withheld
Each quarter carries a coverage figure: how much of the value that could carry an issuer sector actually has one. Holdings with no issuer sector are excluded from that measure, so a manager holding index funds is judged on what could be classified rather than penalised for what could not.
| Coverage | What is shown |
|---|---|
| 95% or better | The allocation, with its coverage stated beneath it. |
| 80% to 95% | The allocation, with the shortfall named explicitly. |
| Below 80% | Withheld. The shape of the bar would describe which securities happened to resolve rather than what the manager holds. |
The allocation-over-time chart is held to a stricter rule. Coverage changes between quarters, and a band that rises across the chart can be a change in what could be resolved rather than a manager rotating into something. If any quarter in a series falls below the threshold, the whole series is withheld rather than the single column, because it is the slope between quarters that would mislead.
A quarter materialized before coverage was measured says so. That is not the same as zero coverage and is not treated as such.
What “performance” means here
The performance figure shown for a continuing position is derived, not observed. It divides a position’s reported value by its reported share count in each of two consecutive quarters and compares the two — an implied price per share at each quarter end. It is not a market return, it does not account for anything that happened between the two dates, and it exists only for positions held across both quarters, since anything opened or closed has no pair to compare.
What this site is for
This is a research tool for generating questions, not answers. A manager’s reported position is evidence of what they held at one moment under constraints, incentives and a mandate you cannot see from the filing. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a claim about what any security is worth.