Institutional holdings

Form 13F helps you see which securities an investment manager reports holding at the end of a quarter. You can use it to explore portfolios, compare positions across periods, or identify managers reporting an investment in a company. It does not give you a trade history or a live view of the manager’s investments.

Who files Form 13F

Institutional investment managers generally must file when they exercise investment discretion over at least $100 million in securities covered by the SEC’s 13F rules. Investment discretion means authority over which securities to buy or sell. The threshold applies to those reportable securities, rather than the manager’s total assets under management.

Managers include investment advisers, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, and other entities managing their own or clients’ investments. A report can combine positions across several funds, accounts, or related managers. It is not necessarily the portfolio of one fund or one person.

The manager reports the holdings. The issuer is the company or fund whose security appears in a row. In Berkshire Hathaway’s report of Apple shares, Berkshire is the manager and Apple is the issuer.

What a holdings report contains

• The cover page identifies the filing manager, reporting quarter, report type, and any amendment
• The summary page gives the information-table entry count, reported value total, and other included managers
• The information table contains the individual holdings rows

The entry count is a count of rows, not necessarily a count of different securities. The value total covers the reported holdings, not everything the manager owns.

Reporting dates

A Form 13F describes holdings at a calendar quarter end: March 31, June 30, September 30, or December 31. Managers generally have up to 45 days after quarter end to file. The SEC’s Form 13F FAQ explains when the filing obligation starts and the deadlines that follow.

Keep these dates separate:

• Reporting date: when the disclosed positions were held
• Filing or acceptance date: when the manager submitted the disclosure and EDGAR accepted it
• Publication time: when Chadwin made the filing available through its update feed

For example, Berkshire’s March 2026 report was filed on May 15. It describes March 31 holdings, not the portfolio on May 15. An amendment filed later can still describe that same March quarter.

Label portfolio views with their reporting date. “Holdings at March 31” is supported by the report; “current holdings” suggests more recent knowledge than the filing provides.

Reading a holding

Read the security, quantity, value, and authority fields together. A large number is easy to misinterpret if you miss the field that tells you what it measures.

Shares, principal amounts, and options

A quantity of one million shares and a principal amount of one million dollars describe different things. Keep the quantity type attached to the amount when you display, group, or compare holdings.

Options give their holder a right to buy a security (a call) or sell it (a put). For a reported option position, the quantity represents the underlying shares, not the number of option contracts. The reported market value also refers to the underlying securities, not the value or purchase price of the options themselves.

A large put value therefore does not tell you what the manager spent on puts. Keep ordinary shareholdings, puts, and calls separate, even when they refer to the same issuer.

Investment discretion and voting authority

Investment discretion concerns investment decisions; voting authority concerns shareholder votes. A manager can have investment discretion without voting authority, so a row with no voting authority does not imply a zero holding.

The source codes SOLE, DFND or DEFINED, and OTR or OTHER distinguish sole, shared-defined, and shared-other discretion. Shared-defined discretion covers specified relationships, including controlling and controlled entities; shared-other covers other shared arrangements. Use the other-manager references to understand those relationships.

Do not treat two managers’ reports as wholly independent portfolios without checking whether one reports holdings for the other. Adding their positions together can count the same economic interest twice.

Holdings rows and positions

One position can span several information-table rows because the manager reports different allocations of investment discretion or other-manager involvement. Those rows remain useful source detail, but a portfolio view usually needs the combined position.

In Berkshire’s March 2026 information table, Apple common stock appears on 12 rows. The first reports 692,000 shares with a market value of $175,622,680. Adding all 12 share quantities gives 227,917,808 shares.

Taking the first Apple row would understate the reported holding. Grouping all rows with “Apple” in the name would be unsafe if the table also contained another share class or Apple options. Match the security, quantity type, and option type before adding amounts.

Use the original rows when you need to examine manager allocations and voting details. Use grouped positions when you want a portfolio list or a consistent basis for comparing quarters.

Reports, notices, and amendments

The submission form tells you whether a filing reports holdings, points to another manager, or amends an earlier disclosure:

The cover page also distinguishes a holdings report, where all reportable holdings appear in that report, from a combination report, where some appear there and other managers report the rest. A notice identifies the managers reporting on the filer’s behalf. None of these labels establishes that the manager has no investments outside the 13F disclosure.

Restatements and new-holdings amendments

A holdings amendment identifies which of two jobs it does:

• Restatement: supplies a complete corrected information table to replace the earlier table
• New holdings: adds entries omitted from an earlier report, including holdings released after confidential treatment

These are corrections or additions to a reporting quarter, not new trades on the amendment’s filing date. Adding every original and amended table together can double-count positions. Taking only the latest amendment can lose holdings that an addition did not repeat.

Chadwin applies those designations when building the effective holdings for a manager and quarter: a restatement replaces the active set, and a new-holdings amendment appends its rows. Each as-filed accession remains available separately. The SEC’s Form 13F instructions explain the reporting and amendment requirements.

Comparing quarters

Compare positions for the same manager, security, quantity type, and option type, using the holdings after amendments for each quarter.

• A higher market value does not prove buying. The price can rise while the quantity stays unchanged
• A changed quantity is not a trade record. Stock splits and other corporate actions can change quantities. The filing does not establish the dates or prices of purchases and sales
• No net change does not mean no trading. A manager can buy and sell during the quarter and finish with the same quantity
• An absent position is not always a confirmed exit. Check amendments, confidentiality, reporting scope, and security identifiers before calling it a sale

A description such as “reported shares increased between March and June” follows the evidence. “Bought in June” adds timing that the two reports cannot establish. Chadwin does not infer trade dates, cost basis, realized returns, or investment intent from these disclosures.

Disclosure limits

Which securities appear

The SEC publishes an official list of reportable securities each quarter. It primarily includes US exchange-traded stocks, exchange-traded and closed-end funds, and certain convertible debt, equity options, and warrants. Securities outside that list should not appear on Form 13F.

Cash, open-end mutual funds, and securities traded only on non-US exchanges are among the assets outside its scope. The list can also change between quarters. A reported portfolio weight is a share of the disclosed 13F holdings, not necessarily a share of the manager’s total assets under management.

Short positions and incomplete public disclosure

Managers do not report short share positions or written options on Form 13F, and they do not subtract short positions from reported long holdings. The table therefore cannot establish a manager’s net exposure or the full set of hedges around a position.

Confidential treatment can delay public disclosure. Certain small positions may also be omitted: for shares, both the quantity must be fewer than 10,000 and the aggregate market value must be below $200,000. The form’s instructions cover the corresponding treatment of convertible debt and options.

A missing public holding, a notice without a holdings table, an unavailable reporting quarter, and an unmatched company are different states. Do not turn all of them into a zero position.

How Chadwin represents the data

Manager and filing identity

A Form 13F file number, such as 028-04545, identifies the manager in the manager endpoints. A CIK identifies an SEC filer, while an accession number identifies one submission. They are separate identifiers; an amendment receives its own accession while still describing the same manager and quarter.

As-filed rows, effective holdings, and grouped positions

• Filing holdings preserve the information-table rows for one accession in source order, without combining other filings
• Manager holdings return the effective rows for a manager and quarter after applying amendments, with each row’s source accession
• Manager positions group those effective rows by a valid CUSIP or CINS identifier, quantity type, and option type, before pagination. Rows whose identifiers or types cannot support that grouping remain separate

Grouped positions include reported_holding_count, the number of rows contributing to each position. They add quantities, market values, and voting amounts separately. If a contributing row lacks a value, the corresponding aggregate remains null rather than treating the missing value as zero. Use manager holdings for row-level discretion, other-manager references, and source-accession detail.

Values and company matches

Financial amounts and quantities use decimal strings so applications can preserve precision. position.amount must be read with position.type, which distinguishes shares from principal_amount. market_value_usd represents US dollars, and security.option_type distinguishes puts and calls from ordinary holdings.

Current source filings report values in whole dollars. Older filings used thousands of dollars before January 3, 2023; Chadwin normalizes reported market values to US dollars. Do not apply the old thousands multiplier to an API value.

The filing identifies securities but does not supply an issuer CIK for each row. Chadwin adds security.company when it has a supported match to a listed company. That object can be null even when the holding’s source issuer, class, quantity, and value are available. A company match is additional reference data, not a condition for retaining the holding.

Using the API

Use a manager’s Form 13F file number to explore its reported portfolio, or an accession number to inspect a particular disclosure. Requests require an API key with institutional holdings access.

Choosing a manager and quarter

Search first if you have a manager name, then use its returned form_13f_file_number for subsequent requests. Search returns up to 25 matches without pagination. Use the manager list to browse a larger set.

For holdings and positions, period is required. Pass a quarter-end date such as 2026-03-31, or latest for the latest available effective holdings quarter. “Latest” does not mean today’s portfolio or simply the most recently filed accession. A manager known only through notices can have no effective holdings period.

Use the periods endpoint to choose a supported quarter for a historical comparison. For a source review, fetch the filing detail and follow its holdings URL. A notice has no holdings table; it is not a zero-valued portfolio.

Pagination and changing data

The manager list uses limit and cursor, with a default page size of 500 and a maximum of 1,000. Filing holdings, manager holdings, and positions default to 1,000 rows or positions per page, with a maximum of 5,000. Continue with next_cursor while has_more is true, keeping the same request filters and page size.

Holdings and positions cursors also bind to the selected data revision. If an amendment or reprocessing changes that data while you paginate, the API returns HTTP 409: manager_period_changed for manager requests or institutional_filing_holdings_changed for filing rows. Restart from the first page so you do not mix revisions. With period=latest, the cursor also preserves the resolved quarter.

Following new disclosures

GET /v1/institutional-filings/feed publishes newly available holdings reports, notices, and amendments. Use each event’s accession to inspect the disclosure, and refresh the relevant manager-quarter view when needed. An update event describes a filing becoming available, not a trade taking place at that time.

The polling feeds guide covers saved cursors and processing updates. Use the API reference for full request parameters, response fields, and errors, or the Node.js SDK guide for client usage.