Methodology & caveats
Everything on FolioFact comes from public SEC filings: quarterly 13F holdings reports and Form 4/5 insider filings. Public filings are a narrow window into a portfolio. Read this page before treating any number here as a fund's conviction.
What a 13F shows — and what it hides
A 13F reports long positions in "13F securities": US exchange-listed stocks and ADRs, certain ETFs and convertibles, and exchange-traded options on them. It does not include:
- Short positions
- Bonds and most other credit
- Shares listed only on non-US exchanges
- Private positions
- Cash levels
So a filing is a fund's disclosed US-listed long book, not its whole book. A manager whose real portfolio is mostly non-US, short, or in credit can look concentrated here while actually being diversified — or hedged against the very positions you see. Every conviction number on this site means conviction within the disclosed book only.
We additionally skip the option rows (puts and calls) that some filings carry: option notional mixed with common stock distorts portfolio weights, so what you see is the reported long equity book.
Timing: up to 45 days stale
13Fs are due up to 45 days after quarter end, and many managers file at the deadline. Positions can change — or be gone entirely — between quarter end and the day you read them. We show the report quarter and the filing date next to every portfolio, and link each filing's source on EDGAR, so you can judge the lag yourself.
Who files at all
Only institutional managers holding $100 million or more in 13F securities must file. Smaller funds are absent by rule, not by choice. On top of that, FolioFact tracks a curated list of funds rather than every filer — see how we curate funds.
Amendments
A quarter can have an original 13F plus later amendments. We read each amendment's type from its cover page: a restatement re-lists the whole portfolio and replaces the stored quarter, while a "new holdings" amendment only discloses positions previously withheld under confidential treatment and is merged into the original. Processing filings oldest to newest with that rule yields the truest available picture of each quarter.
Share classes
Companies with multiple listed share classes (GOOG and GOOGL, BRK.A and BRK.B) appear as separate rows in the source filing. Live fund pages fold known share classes into one company row so a position's weight isn't split across classes; historical quarter views keep the exact class as filed. A merged multi-class row has no single comparable share count, so we omit the count rather than invent one.
Insider data
Insider trades come from SEC Form 4 and Form 5 filings and their amendments. A Form 4 is due within two business days of the transaction; a Form 5 reports exempt or previously unreported transactions annually. We parse non-derivative transactions — actual share trades, not derivative exercises — and keep a ledger of every processed filing. Form 3 initial-ownership snapshots carry no transactions and are excluded.
What we do about all this
- Every portfolio shows its report quarter and filing date, with a link to the source filing on EDGAR.
- Conviction is computed as portfolio weight within the disclosed book: each fund's reported percentage allocation, equal-weighted across funds and normalized, so a large fund cannot dominate the ranking on size alone. It is never a claim about a fund's full economic exposure.
- Change badges (new, add, trim, sold) compare a filing against the fund's immediately prior stored filing — and the page says so when only one quarter is on record.
- Rows without a reported dollar value, and rows whose CUSIP is unusable even after repair, are held back from display rather than shown with made-up numbers.
- Multiple rows for the same security within one filing (investment-discretion entries) are summed into a single position.
None of this is investment advice. Treat FolioFact as an index into the primary sources, not a substitute for them.