Methodology

This page explains how Wall St. Rank transforms raw regulatory filings into the fund portfolio intelligence on this site. It describes our approach at a high level and is not legal or investment advice. See also our about page and disclaimer.

Primary data source

Our fund holdings views are built from Form 13F-HR filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) through EDGAR. Institutional investment managers that meet SEC reporting thresholds must file 13F reports disclosing certain long equity positions. Those raw filings are the input to our pipeline, not the product — nearly everything you see on this site is computed from them, not copied out of them.

What a 13F contains — and what it does not

A 13F is a snapshot of reportable long U.S. equity (and certain equity-like) positions as of quarter end. It is not a complete picture of a fund’s book.

  • Typically included: long positions in U.S.-listed equities and other “13F securities” that meet the SEC’s criteria for that period.
  • Not included: short positions, most bonds and cash, many derivatives beyond the 13F security list, non-U.S. holdings that are out of scope, and positions below reporting thresholds or otherwise exempt from disclosure.
  • Not real-time: filings disclose positions as of quarter end, not the day you read them — see the timing section below.

From raw filings to portfolio intelligence

Raw 13F filings are hard to use directly: each one is an isolated snapshot, filed in varying formats, keyed by CUSIP rather than ticker, and disconnected from every other filing. Our pipeline resolves each reported security across ticker changes, splits, and other corporate actions, links filings to funds and their managers, and normalizes positions across quarters so portfolios can actually be compared over time.

On that normalized base we compute the analytics this site is built around: quarter-over-quarter position changes, portfolio weights and concentration, sector composition, turnover, capital flows, cross-fund rankings, and per-stock fund activity. None of these figures appear in any filing — they are derived by our pipeline.

To date we have processed hundreds of thousands of 13F filings from over 13,000 institutional managers, covering upwards of 120 million reported positions and tens of trillions of dollars in disclosed holdings every quarter, with filing history back to 2013.

Data quality: correcting erroneous filings

13F filings are self-reported, and they routinely contain errors. A common example: position values reported in the wrong units — thousands of dollars instead of whole dollars — inflating or shrinking a holding a thousand-fold. Taken at face value, errors like these distort portfolio totals, rankings, and every statistic built on top of them.

We run proprietary validation and anomaly-detection algorithms, refined across more than a decade of filing data, designed to detect and correct these and many other classes of filing errors before the data reaches this site. The specifics of those checks are part of what makes our data reliable, so we don’t publish them — but their output is on every page.

The 45-day window — and why the data still matters

Managers generally have up to 45 days after quarter end to file, so the freshest public 13F data always trails the market by weeks. We process new filings shortly after they are published.

That lag matters less than it may seem. Institutions that file 13Fs manage portfolios in the billions of dollars; positions of that size are built and unwound over quarters, not days, on investment theses that often span years. A quarterly snapshot remains a meaningful read on how the world’s largest investors are positioned — even though holdings on this site reflect disclosed filings, not live portfolios.

Known limitations

  • Amendments and restatements can change previously published holdings for a quarter — our data updates within seconds of an amendment being filed.
  • Security identification for new, delisted, or poorly identified instruments can lag; our checks catch most mapping issues, but not all.
  • Aggregations and rankings inherit the scope limits of 13F disclosure (no shorts, limited asset classes, delayed publication).
  • Other site features (for example market prices or company fundamentals) may come from separate data feeds and are not themselves 13F filings.

Corrections

If something looks wrong for a specific fund or security, please contact us with the page URL and what you expected to see. We investigate reports and correct verified issues.