Track the whales: institutional and insider filings
Four times a year the largest investors in the US publish what they hold, and company insiders report their own trades within two business days. Here's where all of that lives in Moneyta, how to read it, and the traps that make this data mislead people.
- 1
Start on a company you follow
Open Research and pick a symbol. At the bottom of the page you'll find the dock, with a tab for Institutions and a tab for Insiders. Institutions shows which large managers reported holding this company, how many held it, and how the holder count and total dollars moved from one quarter to the next. Insiders shows the company's own officers and directors buying or selling their own stock. Both tabs are on the Gold plan.
- 2
Read the date before you read the numbers
Every institutional figure carries the quarter it came from and a note about the 45-day reporting lag, because a Form 13F describes the last day of a quarter and can be filed up to 45 days later. That means the freshest institutional picture you can have is between about six weeks and four and a half months old. Insider filings are the opposite: those arrive within two business days, so they are genuinely current.
- 3
Check what the numbers do not include
A 13F shows long US stock positions only. It never shows short positions, cash, bonds, foreign listings, or anything a manager bought and sold inside the same quarter. A manager whose filing looks confidently bullish may be fully hedged in reality. We label this on screen rather than letting it stay invisible, but it is worth carrying in your head every time you read one of these panels.
- 4
Browse the whole market, not just one name
From Research, open Institutional ownership for the market-wide view: which companies are most widely held, which are the most concentrated in a few hands, and which managers moved the most dollars last quarter. The stat cards at the top are all clickable, and each one drops you into the full register where you can sort and filter every manager and every name we track.
- 5
Follow a single manager over time
Click any manager's name to open their page. You'll see their reported book size across quarters (taken from the total they state on their own cover page, not from a sum of rows), what they added, trimmed, opened and exited, how concentrated they run, and any company they hold in more than one form at once, such as stock plus calls plus puts. Watching the same manager across several quarters tells you how they operate, which is the part of this data the reporting lag does not spoil.
- 6
Compare two managers properly
Use Compare managers from the top of the Institutional ownership page. Rather than counting how many names two managers have in common, which ignores position sizes entirely, we compute active share: how differently the two books are actually weighted. Two funds can hold forty of the same companies and still be positioned completely differently. The comparison also shows where peers agree, where they disagree, and what a set of managers just opened.
- 7
Spot insider cluster buying
On the Research landing page, the clustered-buys strip surfaces companies where several different insiders bought on the open market within a short window. We count only genuine open-market purchases, we exclude trades made under prearranged plans (those were decided months earlier and say little about today), and we count officers and directors separately from ten percent owners. It is a prompt to go and read the filings, never a signal to act.
- 8
Open the original filing whenever you want to
Every row in these panels links back to the filing on the SEC's EDGAR system that produced it. If a number looks surprising, follow the link and read the source. We would much rather you check us than trust us.