The information on this website can be an effective tool and a good starting point for finding investment opportunities in the stock market. However, it is important to bear in mind the following points:
The percentages reported only apply to the stock portions of portfolios. We do not include any cash or bond holdings.
The share count data is retroactively split-adjusted.
The portfolio holdings are usually reported mid-quarter and show the investment schedule at the end of the previous quarter. The reported transactions could have taken place at any time during a 3 month span. It is therefore advisable to examine the stock chart of a security for the last several months to get an approximate idea of the transaction price. Value oriented managers tend to use major dips in stock prices to buy or add to positions. It is possible that a purchased security has had a significant run-up in price since the time of transaction, thereby, no longer representing value.
While a reported security purchase may be a good indicator of a manager’s confidence in a stock, the opposite is not necessarily true with a stock sell. At times and especially during major market sell-offs, fund managers have to liquidate a portion of their portfolio to cater for fund holder redemptions. This is usually marked by an across-the-board reduction in their stock holdings. Or they may reluctantly reduce existing positions to fund purchasing of a security they feel offers more compelling value. As a general rule, buys are somewhat more significant than sells.
The money managers we follow tend to be long term investors with time horizons of at least 3 years. Some such as Warren Buffett invest for the next decade and beyond. This, the so called time-horizon arbitrage, can be used as an advantage over the short term thinking, herd following, average ‘investor’ that is the stock market. It often takes years for true value to be realized. Frequent trading will very likely lead to underperformance.
Many of the investors we follow manage billions of dollars in their portfolios making small-cap investing impractical especially given their focused investing methodology. There is therefore a large-cap bias in the portfolios we track.
It is of outmost importance for users of this website to independently evaluate a security and not blindly follow the investment activities of the portfolio managers we track.
Please also refer to our Terms of Service.