How to find what hedge funds are buying
TL;DR
Hedge fund holdings are public and free. Any institutional manager with over $100M in US equities files a quarterly Form 13F-HR on SEC EDGAR listing every long position. Search the manager’s name, open the latest 13F-HR, and read the information table. The catches: the data is 6 weeks to 4 months old (45-day lag) and shows longs only — no shorts. Aggregators just save you the manual work and add scoring + history.
You do not need a paid service to see what hedge funds own. Every position above the reporting threshold is filed with the SEC and published, for free, on EDGAR.
The free way, step by step
- Search the manager on EDGAR. Open SEC EDGAR and search the management company’s legal name (e.g., “Berkshire Hathaway Inc”, “Scion Asset Management”, “Pershing Square Capital Management”) — not the founder’s name.
- Filter to 13F-HR. On the filer’s page, set the filing type to 13F-HR (the holdings report) and open the most recent one.
- Read the information table. Every position is listed with issuer name, CUSIP, market value, and shares — the manager’s long US-equity book as of quarter-end. (See how to read a 13F for what each field means.)
Why the raw filing is painful
EDGAR gives you one manager, one quarter, in a plain table keyed by CUSIP rather than ticker. To answer the questions people actually want — what did this manager buy or sell versus last quarter? which stocks do several managers agree on? who is accumulating despite the headlines?— you have to pull multiple quarters for multiple managers, map CUSIPs to tickers, and diff them by hand. That is the work an aggregator does for you.
Read this before you act on it
- It’s late. The 45-day lag means the trade is weeks to months old before you see it.
- It’s long-only. Shorts, swaps, and hedges are invisible, so a visible long is not proof of a directional bet.
- Not every manager matters. Over 5,000 institutions file the same form; the signal is in which manager and how concentrated and persistent the position is.
Our view
We are not here to gatekeep public data — the steps above genuinely work, and for a single manager and quarter, EDGAR is all you need. What costs time is everything past that: CUSIP mapping, quarter-over-quarter diffs, cross-manager consensus, and separating concentrated conviction from index padding across thousands of filings.
That is the only thing HoldLens adds: we parse every filing from a curated set of managers, map it, diff it, and score each position on a single −100..+100 ConvictionScore so you can read the pattern in seconds instead of an evening. The underlying data is, and always will be, free on EDGAR.
Foundational reading on securities analysis
Finding the holdings is the easy part — knowing what to do with them is the discipline. Graham, Lynch, Munger taught it.
Bookshop.org affiliate links — HoldLens earns a 10% commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. Bookshop.org is the indie-bookseller consortium that supports local bookstores. These are the books we actually recommend. Always do your own research.
Not investment advice. Filing mechanics summarized from SEC EDGAR and the SEC 13F FAQ; verify against the primary sources linked above. See methodology for how we parse and score every filing.
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Skip the manual work
HoldLens parses 30+ tracked managers' filings into one −100..+100 ConvictionScore. Highest conviction now, consensus picks, new positions. Or learn more: what is a 13F, how to read one.