Introduction
Every quarter, institutional investors managing more than $100 million must disclose their positions in U.S. exchange-traded stocks. The filing deadline for Form 13F is generally within forty-five days after the end of a quarter and most investors wait until the last day or two before the deadline to file since holdings of securities represent an important trade secret, especially for well-known investors.
Although the stated purpose of 13F disclosures is to increase investor confidence in the integrity of markets, portfolio disclosures are routinely used as sources of trading and investing ideas despite many dangers and limitations. In The Perils of Blind Coat Tailing, I wrote about the problems facing investors who rely on 13F disclosures for ideas. However, there is nothing wrong with looking at these filings to build a list of companies to independently research based on the holdings of investors you respect.
Dataroma makes following the portfolio changes of superinvestors very easy. Before the website existed, I used to manually look at 13Fs and compare holdings for certain investors from one quarter to another. Dataroma handles that process and provides other valuable features such as showing us all the superinvestors who own a specific company as well as revealing the top ten most owned companies, insider buying at companies with heavy superinvestor ownership, and much more.
I’ve been going through a number of superinvestor portfolios over the past few days. Now that the last of the quarterly filings are in, I thought it would be interesting to highlight a few noteworthy situations.
Dollar General
In my article on Dollar General on September 4, I noted that several investors I respect added to their positions in the stock during the second quarter. I was curious whether these investors would add to their positions following the collapse of the stock price in late August due to weaker than expected earnings. Although the 13F reports do not disclose the timing of purchases during the third quarter, we can see that Tom Gayner, Chris Bloomstran, and Seth Klarman all added to their positions. In addition, three other investors initiated positions while one investor sold.
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