Hedge funds and 13F filings » A reliable indicator? | CARL

Tutorial  

How useful are the information you learn from media regarding large fund managers such as George Soros, Warren Buffet etc who recently bought or sold certain stocks? The answer is not very useful. The information are based on SEC filing called 13f. Here are the reasons why 13f filing information is incomplete and can be misleading:

• Since form 13F can be filed as late as 45 days after the end of the quarter, the information therein may be as old as four months.
• Funds are only required to disclose their long positions (which hedge funds often use only for hedging purposes), but not their short positions.

For example, this media article published on 8/11 has a title that Soros loads up on NVDA and dumps Salesforce and Snowflake. First, pay attention to the timing of this 13f release, it was 8/11, the filing covers buy and sell activities in the preceding quarter ended on 6/30, therefore, these activities happened in the past and information disclosed by 13f is at least one and half month old. So the title used current tense instead of past tense is outright wrong.