What a 13F is, and its 45-day lag

Any institutional manager with more than $100 million in US-listed securities must file Form 13F with the SEC four times a year. It lists what the manager held on the last day of the quarter. Fund pages on Follow are built from these filings, read directly from SEC EDGAR back to the first quarter of 2013.

What is on it#

• US-listed stocks and ETFs held long, with the share count and the value on the quarter's last day.
• Listed options, reported as puts or calls on an underlying. We show these apart from the stock positions and leave them out of the record.
• Some convertible bonds and warrants.

What is not on it#

• Short positions. A fund can be net short a stock it shows as a holding.
• Cash, so you cannot tell how invested the fund is.
• Foreign-listed stocks, bonds, private holdings, swaps and futures.
• Prices paid or dates traded. Only the quarter-end snapshot.
• Anything that changed after the quarter ended.

The 45-day lag#

A 13F is due within 45 days of the quarter's end, and most funds file on or near the deadline. By the time you can read it, the newest trade in it is at least six weeks old and the oldest is more than four months old.

Every fund page shows the quarter a filing reports on, the date it was filed and the lag in days, so the age of what you are reading is never hidden.

How we read a filing#

• Positions are identified by CUSIP in the filing. We map each CUSIP to a ticker through OpenFIGI. A position we cannot map is shown by name and counted as unmapped.
• Weights are each stock position's value over the total of stock positions. Options are excluded from the weights.
• Changes compare this quarter's share counts with the previous filing: new, added, reduced, sold or held.
• An amended filing (13F-HR/A) replaces the original for that quarter and is marked as amended.
• We read a fixed list of funds, not every 13F filer. A fund outside the list has no page, and a fund on it has a record only once its filings have been read.