If a firm manages more than $100 million of US shares, the law requires it to file a list of those holdings every quarter. The filing is called a 13F, and anyone can read it for free. That is how the press knows what Warren Buffett owns.
Two limits matter more than anything else, and most write-ups skip them.
The first is timing. The filing is not due until 45 days after the quarter ends. So when you read that a famous investor bought something, you are learning what they held up to a month and a half ago. They may have sold the whole thing since, and you would have no way of knowing.
It is a photograph, not a live feed — and the photograph was taken six weeks ago. Useful for seeing where someone stood. Useless for seeing where they are walking.
The second limit is what the filing leaves out. It lists only shares the manager owns outright. Bets against a company, options, bonds, cash, and anything listed outside the US are all absent.
That gap can invert the meaning entirely. A fund might appear to hold a large stake in an airline while quietly holding an offsetting bet elsewhere that the filing never shows. You see one leg of the position and assume it is the whole stance.
- Up to 45 days old by law — never current.
- Long share positions only: no shorts, options, bonds or cash.
- US-listed holdings only.
- A "new" position may have been building quietly for months before disclosure.
There is also a question of which investors are worth reading at all. The largest filers are index funds, which own nearly every listed company because that is precisely what they promise to do. Learning that such a fund holds a stock tells you about the fund, not the stock.
The filings worth your time come from managers who hold a small number of positions chosen deliberately. When someone with thirty holdings opens a new one, that is a decision. When a fund with five thousand holdings does, it is arithmetic.
And the most informative line is rarely the largest holding — it is what changed. A position sold out of entirely is a view being reversed, and that is invisible if you only read what someone still owns.
Finisdom’s 13F page tracks ten concentrated, actively-managed funds, showing what each opened, exited, added and trimmed since the previous quarter, and where any of it overlaps what you hold. Index giants are excluded on purpose, and the filing lag is printed on every card.