Whale Wisdom: About this site

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 I come in. By Screen Scraping the filings from the SEC and then applying regular expressions, I 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.

We have also started tracking brokerage upgrades/downgrades. Archived brokerage coverages from briefing.com are retrieved daily going back as far as Jan. 1, 2007. You can track the performance of a mock portfolio based soley on a brokerage's coverage ratings here. You can view the daily imported upgrades/downgrades here. . Brokerage performance will be updated quarterly using only active coverages.

We have also started pulling insider trading Form 4 and 4/A information from Edgars. These filings are retrieved once a day and made available immediately upon parsing. Check it out here or view the left column statistics for the most active buying and selling in the last 60 days. When collecting this data, we have focused only on non-derivative common stock transactions.