13F filings are months old, and one in six positions is already gone

You have seen the headline. A famous fund "just bought" something, the ticker moves, and the story spreads before anyone checks the date on it.

The date is the entire story. We hold 278 institutional filings covering 193,902 positions, and we measured how old they were the moment they became public.

The rule, and why the number is old before you read it

A 13F describes what a fund held on the last day of a quarter. It is due 45 days after that day.

So the freshest possible 13F is already 45 days old on the morning it appears. That is the best case, and it is guaranteed by the rule rather than by anybody being slow.

The worst case is much worse, and it is the one nobody says out loud. A position opened on the first day of a quarter does not appear anywhere until that quarter's filing lands. Take our newest period, 2026-06-30, filed as late as 2026-08-13. A holding established on 2026-04-01 sat invisible for the whole quarter and then another six weeks. Read it today and you are looking at a decision that is 136 days old. Roughly four and a half months.

Nothing about that is a scandal. It is just what the form is. The mistake is reading it as news.

Nearly two thirds file on the very last day

If the deadline is 45 days, you might hope most funds file sooner. They do not.

178 of 278, about 64%, filed on day 45 exactly. Another 25 were late, which is roughly one filing in eleven arriving after a deadline that has been the same for decades. The earliest anybody filed was day 26.

There is no prize for filing early and a real cost to showing your hand, so the incentive runs entirely one way. Assume day 45 and you will be right about two thirds of the time.

The finding: one in six positions is already gone

Here is the part we could only measure because we store the history rather than just the latest snapshot.

Take every filer that appears in both the 2026-03-31 and the 2026-06-30 period, and compare their positions across the two.

Of 3,832 positions held at the end of Q1, 608 were gone by the end of Q2. That is 15.9%, near enough one in six.

Now put that next to the lag. Between the Q1 filing appearing in mid-May and the Q2 filing appearing in mid-August, the Q1 data was the only data anybody had. Over those three months, roughly one position in six quietly stopped being true, and there was no way to know which.

A further 539 positions were newly opened in Q2 and were invisible for the same window. So the picture you had was wrong in both directions at once: it showed you things that were no longer there, and hid things that were.

What a 13F does not contain, which is most things

Even perfectly fresh, a 13F is a partial view. It lists US-listed long equity holdings and little else. It does not show you:

• Short positions. None of them, ever. A fund can hold a stock and be net short it through other instruments, and the 13F shows only the long leg.
• Cash. A fund that sold everything and is sitting in treasuries looks, on a 13F, like a smaller version of its old self.
• Foreign listings, most debt, and most private holdings. They are simply out of scope.

So "this fund is bullish on the name" is not something a 13F establishes. It establishes that on one specific day, months ago, this line item existed.

Worth knowing there is a faster form. Anyone crossing 5% ownership of a company files a 13D or 13G, and the 13D deadline is measured in days rather than a quarter plus 45. When a real ownership event happens, that is where it shows up first. It covers big stakes only, so it is narrow, but it is current in a way a 13F structurally cannot be.

How to read one without being caught out

1. Find the period date, not the filing date. The headline will quote the filing date because it is more recent. The period date is the one that tells you what you are looking at.
2. Add the whole quarter, not just the 45 days. The position could have been opened on day one of that quarter. Assume the worst case unless the filing tells you otherwise.
3. Never read a single quarter alone. One snapshot cannot distinguish a conviction position from something bought and already sold. Two consecutive filings can.
4. Treat an absence as unknown, not as an exit. A name missing from a 13F might have been sold, or might have moved into an instrument the form does not cover.
5. Ask what moved before you saw it. If the price already ran, the fund's entry is months behind you and so is the news.

Our smart money board shows the filers we track with their period dates attached, and each filer has its own page where positions can be read across quarters rather than one at a time. The investors page is the same data by name.

If you want the rest of the series, the four numbers that decide a short squeeze and why almost nobody can source a float are the other two. The thread running through all three is the same: the figures retail trades on are older and softer than the confident way they get quoted, and knowing the age of a number is most of knowing what it is worth.