What a 13F cannot tell you
Everyone quotes 13F filings. What is actually missing from them?
A 13F shows long US equity positions, 45 days late. It does not show shorts, bonds, cash, currencies, commodities or anything held outside America. A manager who looks wildly bullish in a filing may be hedged to neutrality by positions the form has no box for.
We could not reach the database to compute this study just now. The figures below are therefore missing, rather than zero. We would rather show you an honest gap than a confident blank.
What a 13F shows, and what it hides
- Long US equities
- US-listed ETFs
- Options (at notional value)
- Short positions
- Bonds and credit
- Cash
- Currencies
- Commodities and futures
- Anything listed outside the US
- Private holdings
- What they did in the 45 days since
The document everyone quotes covers one corner of a portfolio. A manager who looks wildly bullish in a filing may be hedged to neutrality by positions the form has no box for. This is why copying a 13F reliably underperforms the person you are copying.
- The figures above are the scale of what we DO hold: our full 13F coverage for the latest usable quarter.
- The point of the page is everything that is not in that number.
- SHORTS ARE INVISIBLE. A fund can hold a huge long position and be net short the same name through instruments the 13F does not cover.
- BONDS, CASH, CURRENCIES AND COMMODITIES are all absent. For a macro fund, the 13F may be a rounding error on the real book.
- FOREIGN HOLDINGS are absent. A global manager's US equity sleeve can be a small fraction of what they run.
- IT IS UP TO 45 DAYS OLD on the day it is published, and the manager is under no obligation to still hold any of it.
- OPTIONS ARE REPORTED AT NOTIONAL VALUE, which overstates the money at risk, sometimes by an enormous multiple.
- This is why copying a 13F is a reliable way to underperform the person you are copying: you inherit the position without the thesis, the hedge, or the exit.
Free to quote, chart or republish with attribution. Cite as: SteadyShares, What a 13F cannot tell you, https://steadyshares.com/research/what-a-13f-cannot-tell-you. If you are a journalist and want the underlying query or a different cut of the data, ask and we will run it.
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Educational information, not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. A late regulatory filing is a paperwork failure and nothing more: we make no allegation of wrongdoing against any person named on this page.