How to follow smart money with 13F filings

After this post you will be able to open any investment manager's 13F filing on EDGAR, work out what they bought and sold last quarter, and judge whether the position means anything. You need a browser and about twenty minutes per manager. No account, no paid tool. Supercycle's investor pages are the worked example.

The part most 13F guides skip is what the filing does not contain. It has no short positions, no cash, no options that hedge the longs, and it is between 45 and 135 days old when you read it. Half of this post is about reading around those gaps, because that is where copying a 13F goes wrong.

What does a 13F filing actually show?

Any manager with investment discretion over $100 million or more in US-listed stocks must file Form 13F with the SEC within 45 days of each calendar quarter end, under the SEC's Form 13F rules. The filing is a table: one row per security, with the issuer name, the CUSIP, the share count and the market value at quarter end. Since January 2023 values are reported to the nearest dollar rather than the nearest thousand, which matters if you are reading older filings.

In the filing	Not in the filing
Long positions in US-listed stocks and ETFs	Short positions, and no netting against longs
Listed put and call options, marked as such	Cash, bonds, private companies
Share count and value on the last day of the quarter	Anything bought or sold since that day
The manager's total portfolio value	Cost basis, or the reason for the trade
Every position, even tiny ones	Foreign-listed shares, unless held as US ADRs

Three form types show up on EDGAR. 13F-HR is the holdings report you want. 13F-NT is a notice that another manager is reporting the holdings instead. 13F-HR/A is an amendment, which usually means a position was left out the first time.

Step 1: Choose managers whose filings are worth reading

A 13F is most useful when the manager holds few positions and holds them for a long time. A quant fund with a thousand positions turned over monthly tells you nothing four months later. Bridgewater's latest filing lists 997 positions. Berkshire Hathaway's lists 29.

The academic case for following managers rests on concentration too. The Best Ideas paper by Antón, Cohen and Polk found that the position a manager is most overweight, relative to their benchmark, outperformed the market and the rest of their own portfolio, while most of the other holdings did not. Their conclusion is that the signal lives in the top of the list, not the whole list.

Supercycle tracks 24 managers: Buffett, Druckenmiller, Tepper, Ackman, Coleman, Laffont, Gerstner, Dalio, Soros, Klarman, Loeb and others, plus two companies that file 13Fs because they hold stock in other companies: SoftBank and NVIDIA. NVIDIA's filing is the odd one worth knowing about. It is a chip maker's own list of stakes in its customers and suppliers.

You should now have a shortlist of three to five managers, each with a reason: concentrated, patient, or investing in the layer of the buildout you care about.

Step 2: Find the filing on EDGAR

1. Go to EDGAR full-text search and search the fund's legal name, not the person. Druckenmiller files as Duquesne Family Office. Buffett files as Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Tepper files as Appaloosa.
2. Open the filer's page and filter the form type to 13F-HR. Each filer has a CIK number, and bookmarking the CIK-filtered list saves the search next quarter. Duquesne's is 1536411.
3. Open the latest 13F-HR. The filing index has two useful documents: the primary document with the cover page and totals, and the information table, offered as a formatted HTML page and as raw XML. The HTML table is the one to read.
4. Sort by value. The top ten rows are the portfolio; the rest is detail.

You should now see a table with a few dozen to a few hundred rows, each with a share count and a value in dollars, dated the last day of the quarter.

Step 3: Compare it with the previous quarter

The filing is a snapshot. The information is in the difference between two snapshots. Open the prior quarter's 13F-HR in a second tab and sort every position into one of five buckets:

Bucket	Test	What it usually means
New	In this quarter, not in the last	The manager decided to buy; the most informative row
Increased	Share count went up	Conviction rising, or averaging down after a fall
Trimmed	Share count went down, position remains	Taking profit, or size discipline after a run
Exited	In last quarter, not in this	The manager decided to sell; the second most informative row
Unchanged	Same share count	The value moved only because the price did

Compare share counts, never values. A position whose value rose 30 percent with the same share count was not bought; the stock went up. This is the mistake behind most "Buffett loaded up on X" headlines.

Supercycle's investor pages do this comparison at build time, for the AI slice of each portfolio, so each position carries a new, increased, trimmed or unchanged tag and an exited list sits beneath the table. On Druckenmiller's page, the June 30, 2026 filing (filed August 14, 2026) shows Alphabet, AMD, Palo Alto Networks and Fluor as new AI positions, Amazon's share count up more than tenfold from a small base, and a dozen exits including Broadcom, Micron, Intel and Coherent. That is a manager rotating within the theme, not leaving it.

You should now have a short list of new and exited positions for each manager, which is the only part of the filing worth thinking about further.

Step 4: Read position size as conviction

Dollar value tells you how big the fund is. Percentage of the portfolio tells you what the manager thinks. A $120 million position is a rounding error at Berkshire and a top-ten position at Duquesne.

So the second column to compute is each position's share of the manager's total, which the cover page gives you. Supercycle renders this as "% of portfolio" on every investor page and on each stock's Investors tab. Buffett's page is the clearest example: Apple is a fifth of the book and the share count did not move, so that row tells you nothing new. The two Alphabet rows, both increased, tell you Berkshire bought last quarter.

The Best Ideas result applies here. The top-weighted position is the one with a track record of meaning something. The fortieth is noise.

You should now be able to rank each manager's positions by weight and see which two or three carry the portfolio.

Step 5: Check the date, and check for confidential treatment

A 13F filed on August 14 describes June 30. A position opened in early April was already four and a half months old when the world saw it. Before acting on a filing, check what the stock did between quarter end and filing day; a large share of the move a manager was positioned for can already be gone.

Managers can also ask the SEC to keep a position out of the public filing while they build it. The SEC's FAQ names "an ongoing program of acquisition or disposition" as a ground for granting it. Berkshire's Chubb stake was withheld from two quarters of filings and only appeared in May 2024, after a $6.7 billion position was in place. A withheld position surfaces later, in the next regular filing or in an amendment that adds the missing rows, so the biggest new position in a filing is sometimes months older than it looks.

You should now know how stale each filing is and whether anything may have been left out.

Step 6: Look for the hedge you cannot see

A 13F can show a manager long a stock while they are short it, or short the index, elsewhere. The filing includes listed options, and Supercycle shows them separately on each investor page because they change the reading of the longs beneath them. Druckenmiller's latest filing carries call options on Amazon, CDW and Meta alongside the shares. Calls beside a long position amplify it. Puts beside a long position are a hedge, and a long position that is fully hedged with puts is not a bet on the stock at all.

Short positions never appear. If a manager is known for pairs trades or for hedging with index shorts, treat every long in their 13F as half a trade.

You should now have, for each manager, a list of longs you trust as real bets and a list you cannot read without the other side.

Step 7: Filter the filing through your own question

A raw 13F answers "what does this manager own." A useful one answers your question. Supercycle's version of the question is "how much of this book is in AI buildout companies, and where in the buildout does it sit," so the investor pages keep only positions in the tracked universe, weight them by AI Exposure Score, and break the AI slice into layers: semiconductors, cloud, power, and so on. Druckenmiller's AI slice is weighted toward AI healthcare, on the strength of Natera. Buffett's sits in semiconductors, through Apple.

Then reverse it. On any stock page, the Investors tab lists which tracked managers hold that name, at what weight, and whether they added or trimmed last quarter. Three concentrated managers adding the same stock in the same quarter is a stronger signal than any one of them alone.

You should now be able to move in both directions: from a manager to the theme they are expressing, and from a stock to the managers who share your view of it.

Step 8: Put the four filing deadlines on a calendar

The 45-day rule makes the deadlines fixed. Most managers file on the last possible day, so the information arrives in four clumps a year.

Quarter ends	Filings due by
March 31	May 15
June 30	August 14
September 30	November 14
December 31	February 14

Supercycle refreshes the investor pages after each window closes; the as-of date is shown at the top of the tracker. The next batch, covering the quarter that ended September 30, 2026, is due by November 14.

What to watch in the next filings

The September quarter filings will show whether the rotation Druckenmiller's June filing hinted at, out of the chip suppliers and into the software layer, continued or reversed. They will also show whether NVIDIA's own stakes in CoreWeave and Nebius changed, which the chip maker's 13F discloses and its earnings calls do not. Both land on EDGAR by November 14.