Institutional Radar

What this is

A single reading of whether active institutional investors are, on balance, buying or selling US equities this quarter — leaning toward net buying (risk-on) or net selling (risk-off).

Source

SEC Form 13F — the quarterly portfolio holdings that large investment managers are required to disclose. Browse filings on SEC EDGAR ↗

How we calculate it

For every active manager we compare this quarter's buys against its sells, valued in dollars at end-of-quarter prices. The net of those flows across all active managers is scaled onto a fixed range, so readings are comparable from one quarter to the next.

Limitations

SEC filings arrive with a lag of up to 45 days, so the barometer describes where institutions were positioned last quarter, not where they are today. It sees long US-equity positions only — short positions, options, derivatives, cash and non-13(f) securities are invisible to it. Index and other passive funds are removed using our own name-and-turnover heuristic plus a hand-curated list of mega-managers; that is our judgement call, not an official SEC classification.

This is not insider information and not investment advice.

What this is

Where institutional capital is flowing across market sectors this quarter — which corners of the market are being accumulated and which are being trimmed.

Source

SEC Form 13F holdings, mapped to each company's sector classification. Browse filings on SEC EDGAR ↗

How we calculate it

For every stock we sum the net institutional dollar flow, then group those flows by the stock's sector classification. The colour shows each sector's change in portfolio weight, so a sector can light up because money rotated into it — not simply because it happens to be large.

Limitations

The map is dollar-weighted, not a count of trades, so a handful of very large positions can dominate a sector's colour. Coverage is not complete: small, foreign or newly listed tickers we cannot map to a sector fall into an "Unmapped" bucket and sit outside the sector totals. It carries the same 45-day filing lag and long-equity-only scope as the barometer.

This is not insider information and not investment advice.

What this is

How widely a move is shared — the share of funds that grew a position versus the share that cut it. Breadth answers "how many funds", where the barometer answers "how many dollars".

Source

SEC Form 13F — quarterly institutional holdings. Browse filings on SEC EDGAR ↗

How we calculate it

We use the Sias (2004) breadth measure: the fraction of funds increasing a position, adjusted for funds crossing the $100M reporting threshold between quarters, so new filers and drop-outs do not distort the count.

Limitations

Breadth is a headcount measure, not a dollar measure — one enormous position can matter as much to the market as hundreds of small ones, and breadth deliberately ignores that difference. It shares the same 13F source, 45-day lag and long-only scope as the barometer, and the $100M threshold means smaller managers never enter the calculation at all.

This is not insider information and not investment advice.

What this is

Stocks that at least ten active funds opened as a new position in the same quarter — the names where independent managers are quietly converging on the same idea.

Source

SEC Form 13F — quarterly institutional holdings. Browse filings on SEC EDGAR ↗

How we calculate it

For each stock we count the distinct active funds that reported a brand-new position this quarter, and surface the names where that count reaches ten or more.

Limitations

The up-to-45-day filing lag means the convergence you see already happened last quarter. "Active" is our own heuristic based on a fund's name and portfolio turnover, not an official SEC label, so the line between an active manager and an index-hugging one is a judgement call. A shared new position is not a recommendation — funds buy for reasons we cannot see.

This is not insider information and not investment advice.

What this is

The stocks that show up most often inside funds' own top-ten holdings — the names institutions are most heavily committed to, not just the ones they nibble at.

Source

SEC Form 13F — quarterly institutional holdings. Browse filings on SEC EDGAR ↗

How we calculate it

This is our own take on the idea behind the Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund VIP basket: for every active fund we find its ten largest positions, then rank stocks by how many funds hold them among those top ten.

Limitations

This is our independent calculation on our own data — it is NOT the Goldman Sachs "GVIP" product and will not match it. It inherits the 45-day filing lag, the long-equity-only scope and our active/passive heuristic. We exclude index funds and ETFs we can identify from this list; an occasional fund ticker may still slip through. A stock being widely held says nothing about whether it is cheap or expensive today.

This is not insider information and not investment advice.

What this is

How many dollars flowed into or out of registered ETFs and mutual funds this quarter, and what share of their assets those funds are holding in cash rather than investing.

Source

SEC Form N-PORT (Item C.9) — funds' own monthly portfolio reports. Browse filings on SEC EDGAR ↗

How we calculate it

These are the funds' own numbers, reported directly on SEC Form N-PORT and summed across the whole universe of registered funds we track — flows from the monthly Item C.9 figures, cash levels from the same filings.

Limitations

This covers REGISTERED funds — ETFs and mutual funds — only. It is not "institutional cash" in general: hedge funds, pension funds and separately managed accounts report this to no one publicly, so a large slice of institutional money is simply invisible here. N-PORT filings can lag by up to ~60 days, and a quarter still being filed may understate the true total.

This is not insider information and not investment advice.