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Methodology — Institutional Ownership (13F), Insiders & Short Interest

The OWN surface answers one question three ways: who owns this security, and which way are they moving? Institutions (SEC Form 13F), insiders (SEC Forms 3/4/5), and the short side (FINRA consolidated short interest). Every figure is read from a public regulatory filing or file — nothing is estimated from price action, and a missing figure renders as a dash, never a zero.

Institutional holders — SEC Form 13F

What it is. Every institutional investment manager with ≥ $100M in 13(f) securities must file a quarterly Form 13F listing its long US-listed equity positions. We ingest the SEC's bulk 13F data sets — all ~10,000 filers, the last 12 report quarters — so the "top holders" list is the true ranking across every filer, not a curated subset.

Known limitations (inherent to the form, disclosed in-app):

  • Lag. 13F is due up to 45 days after quarter-end. The newest quarter shown is a lagged snapshot, never live positioning.
  • Long-only, US-listed. Shorts, cash, most derivatives and non-US listings are not reported. We additionally drop option (PUT/CALL) and debt lines so "holders" means real equity ownership.
  • Amendments. Only the latest filing per manager-quarter is kept, so a refiled report never double-counts.
  • Reporting units. Position values are normalized to whole dollars by a data-driven check (the 2023 thousands→dollars switch was not adopted uniformly by filers).

Derived fields (what & why):

  • Quarter-over-quarter change per holder — a position is tagged add / trim / hold / new / exit vs the same manager's prior filing of the name. In the multi-quarter trend grid the comparison is against the manager's nearest earlier filing, so a skipped quarter reads as a gap, not a false "new" or "exit".
  • % of shares outstanding — shares held relative to the company's latest reported share count (from SEC cover-page facts). This is deliberately not "% of float": no float figure exists in our stores, and shares outstanding > float, so our percentage reads lower than the %float convention. We label the basis rather than borrow the more flattering one.
  • Institutional footprint by quarter — total 13F shares, holder count and value per report quarter: the trend of institutional presence in the name.
  • 13F net flow (screener column) — the quarter-over-quarter change in total institutional shares held, as a fraction of shares outstanding. Null when either quarter is missing (a missing quarter is missing, never "zero holdings") and computed only where the listed line's share basis matches the reported count (see the ADR note below).
  • ADR sibling resolution. 13Fs are filed against the US listing's identifier, so a home- exchange line (e.g. ASML.AS) has no 13F rows of its own. Where a provable US-listed sibling exists, its holders are shown with a disclosure line — the figures are the US line's, and percentages are suppressed where the two lines' share-count bases (ordinary vs depositary shares) differ.

Insiders — SEC Forms 3/4/5

What it is. Officers, directors and 10% owners must report transactions in their own company's stock (Form 4, generally within 2 business days; collected by the SEC into quarterly bulk data sets, which is the cadence we ingest).

Why the transaction code matters. The form mixes open-market trades with compensation mechanics. We preserve the code verbatim and separate open-market buys (P) and sells (S) from grants (A), option exercises (M), tax withholding (F) and gifts (G) — a $10M option grant is never shown as "insider bought $10M". Derivative (option) rows are excluded; the non-derivative table is the real common-stock signal. Values are shares × price only where a real price was reported.

Derived field — insider cluster (screener column). The count of distinct open-market buyers minus distinct sellers over a trailing window, clamped to a small symmetric range. Why distinct people: the informative event in the insider literature is several unrelated insiders buying at once (the "cluster buy"), not the size of any one trade; the clamp keeps a mega-cap's routine 40-seller quarter from dominating the scale. No activity is shown as no signal — never as a zero.

Short interest — FINRA consolidated files

What it is. FINRA Rule 4560 requires member firms to report their short positions in all equity securities twice a month. We ingest FINRA's free consolidated per-symbol file for each settlement cycle: shares short, the average daily volume, and days to cover.

Known limitations:

  • Settlement-dated and stale by construction. Each cycle is as of a settlement date and is published about a week later. Every figure in-app is labeled with its settlement date; nothing is presented as "today's" short interest.
  • Days to cover is capped by FINRA for illiquid names. A capped value is a sentinel, not a measurement — we show a dash instead.
  • % of shares outstanding, not % of float — same basis rule (and same reason) as the 13F percentages above, and suppressed where an ADR share basis would make the ratio wrong.

Sources

SEC bulk Form 13F data sets; SEC insider (Forms 3/4/5) transaction data sets; FINRA consolidated equity short interest. All are public regulatory data. See the data-sources page for licensing notes. Nothing on this surface is investment advice, and no causal claim is made from any holder's action.