Whalewisdom Blog

September 27, 2008

Whalewisdom Overview

We’ve set up this blog to highlight and explain some of the features of Whalewisdom, hedge funds, and 13f filings, but first an overview for th uninitiated.

Form 13F is a filing that all institutional investors who manage over $100 million in assets must submit to the SEC no later than 45 days after the end of the March, June, September, and December quarters. The 13F is essentially a list of holdings that large investors own.
Individual activists or “whales” are also required to file Form 13F. These include successful investors such as Warren Buffett (see Berkshire Hathaway), T Boone Pickens (see BP Capital), Carl Icahn, and Eddie Lampert (see RBS Partners). By comparing current holdings with previous quarters, one may infer which stocks are being bought and sold by the “whales”.
While the SEC provides a searchable database of 13F filings, this database will show you the entire filing only. It makes no attempt to parse the filing and collect information on individual stocks. That’s where Whalewisdom comes in. By Screen Scraping the filings from the SEC and then applying regular expressions, we have painstakingly parsed the Edgar database’s collection of 13F filings and extracted the list of individual stocks included in each filing into my own searchable database. The filings go back as far as the 9/30/2007 quarter.

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