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A guide to the app’s ownership data: what to explore, how disclosures work, and where the picture is incomplete.
Reporting guidance reviewed September 12, 2026.
Finding your way around
Start with an investor, a company, or a recent disclosure
OwnershipTrace brings together several kinds of public ownership disclosure. Each answers a different question: what a manager held, who disclosed a significant stake, who reported a transaction, or what a fund owned.
- Follow an investor. Start with Elite Investors to explore a curated group of managers, their largest holdings, changes, and shared positions.
- Research a company. Open a company from a table, then use its ownership links to explore other available views of that company.
- Discover recent activity. Start on an area’s dashboard and use View all to explore the full list behind a summary. Date and period controls define which reports you are comparing.
- Check the evidence. Filing and Report links open the original source. Read it when an unusual change, ownership structure, or footnote matters.
Elite Investors and House Trades are public. The other data areas require Premium access; this guide is available to everyone.
Elite Investors
Form 13F · institutional portfolio snapshots
Explore the reported portfolios of tracked managers, compare their holdings, and find companies held by several of them. An investor page shows positions, changes, options, and filing history; a company page shows its tracked holders.
What is disclosed
Institutional investment managers meeting the $100 million reporting threshold file Form 13F quarterly, generally within 45 days of quarter end. It covers securities on the SEC’s Section 13(f) list, including many US-listed shares and ETFs. It is a snapshot of the report date.
What the picture leaves out
Cash, short equity positions, most bonds, and shares listed only outside the US are generally absent. Confidential treatment and permitted omissions can also hide positions. The app follows selected managers, so its holder counts and consensus views describe that tracked group.
New, Add, Trim, Hold, and Exited describe changes between reports. They do not reveal trade dates, execution prices, or every trade during the quarter. A position could have changed again before the filing became public. Corporate actions can also change share counts.
Options and portfolio values
Reported puts and calls are held options; written options are excluded. The filing gives the value of the underlying shares, with no strike, expiry, or premium. A put alone does not establish a bearish view.
OwnershipTrace lists options separately and excludes their underlying values from share-portfolio values and weights. A 13F portfolio total covers reported long-share positions, so it is different from the manager’s total assets under management. Growth in that total can reflect prices, flows, and changed holdings; it is not an investment return.
Adviser profiles · Form ADV
Where available, an investor’s adviser profile adds firm background from Form ADV, such as its advisory business, clients, and regulatory assets under management. Those figures describe the adviser at their own reporting date and can cover assets outside its 13F portfolio. Use the linked adviser disclosures for further context.
Official sources: SEC: Form 13F questions and answers · Investor.gov: Form ADV
House Trades
House periodic transaction reports · disclosed transactions
Browse reported purchases and sales by House members, open a member’s transaction history, or see the disclosures associated with a company. The app’s House coverage does not represent the whole US Congress.
Periodic transaction reports generally cover purchases, sales, and exchanges of covered securities exceeding $1,000. They are due within 30 days of learning about a transaction, and no later than 45 days after it occurred.
Read the owner and the amount range
A disclosure can concern the member, a spouse, a dependent child, or joint ownership. The named member is the filer and may not be the person who made the trade.
Amounts are reported in bands rather than exact dollar values. They do not establish share counts, execution prices, portfolio weights, or investment returns. A transaction list also cannot reconstruct a household’s complete portfolio. Amendments, late reports, and ambiguous security descriptions can change the picture.
Official sources: House Ethics: financial disclosure and deadlines · House Ethics: periodic transaction report instructions
Active Ownership
Schedule 13D · significant stakes and stated intentions
Discover significant stakes, follow amendments, and explore the reporting persons behind a company’s ownership disclosures. The original filing’s purpose-of-transaction discussion is particularly useful for understanding the filer’s stated intentions.
Schedule 13D generally applies when someone acquires beneficial ownership of more than 5% of a covered class of equity securities and cannot use Schedule 13G. The initial deadline is five business days; material changes generally require an amendment within two business days.
A stake disclosure has a specific scope
The percentage relates to the relevant share class, rather than the filer’s portfolio. Beneficial ownership can include voting or disposal powers shared through funds, trusts, or a reporting group. Adding each reporting person’s figure may count the same shares more than once.
A 13D is not necessarily an activist campaign. Read the stated purpose and agreements before drawing that conclusion. Changes in the reported percentage can also reflect changes in the number of shares outstanding. These disclosures do not provide a complete trading history or visibility into every stake below the threshold.
Official sources: SEC: beneficial ownership reporting rules
Passive Ownership
Schedule 13G · significant ownership disclosures
Explore significant reported holdings, increases, reductions, and disclosures that a holder has fallen below the reporting threshold. Company and holder pages put successive disclosures in context.
Schedule 13G is the shorter beneficial ownership report available to qualifying institutional, passive, and exempt investors. It generally concerns more than 5% of a covered equity class. The app’s Passive Ownership label groups these disclosures; it does not mean that every filer runs an index fund.
There is no single reporting interval
Deadlines depend on the filer category and ownership level. Some initial reports are due within five business days; others follow quarter-end deadlines, with additional rules for larger stakes and changes. Always check the ownership date and filing date shown.
Shared ownership and reporting groups can overlap, just as in 13D. A final disclosure below 5% does not necessarily mean the holder sold everything. An unchanged or missing disclosure does not prove that the position is unchanged today.
Holder types
Each holder is labeled from the type it declares in its own filing, such as individual, investment adviser, partnership or corporation, and from the filing rule: holders who owned shares before the company registered them, such as founders, are shown as founding or early holders. Large asset managers, banks and brokers come from a reviewed list, and activist investors from the activist watchlist. Lists can be filtered by holder type, for example to leave out large asset managers and banks, whose stakes mostly reflect index funds and client accounts.
Hedge funds are identified from the adviser’s SEC Form ADV, where advisers list the private funds they manage and their type. A holder is shown as a hedge fund when hedge funds make up at least a third of its adviser’s assets. The SEC’s definition of a hedge fund is broad and includes some credit and performance-fee funds. The structured Form ADV data currently runs to the end of 2024, so the label shows which filing it is based on.
Major holders and joint filings
A company’s major holders show each holder’s latest disclosure. When several people or entities file jointly, the largest stake any one of them reported is shown and marked as joint. It is never added up, because joint filers often report the same shares.
Moves between passive and active ownership
A holder must file a 13D (Active Ownership) instead of a 13G (Passive Ownership) when it may seek to influence the company or no longer qualifies as passive, and can return to a 13G later. The app shows these as moves to active or passive ownership when the same holder files both forms on the same company on different days, from December 2024 onward. A move to active ownership does not by itself mean the holder is running a campaign.
Official sources: SEC: Schedule 13D and 13G reporting guidance
Insider Transactions
Forms 3, 4, and 5 · ownership and transactions by company insiders
Explore reported transactions by directors, officers, and other reporting insiders. Company pages bring their disclosures together; insider pages let you follow a person’s reported activity across companies.
- Form 3 establishes an insider’s initial reported ownership. It does not itself establish a new purchase.
- Form 4 reports changes in ownership, generally within two business days of the transaction.
- Form 5 is an annual report for certain transactions eligible for deferred reporting and transactions not previously reported.
Transaction type matters
Purchases and sales differ from grants, gifts, option exercises, conversions, and shares withheld for tax. Read the activity label before interpreting an acquisition as buying or a disposal as selling. Direct and indirect ownership also describe different interests.
Footnotes can explain weighted-average prices, ownership through another entity, or a prearranged trading plan. A transaction alone does not reveal the insider’s motivation. The published record can contain corrections and delayed reports.
Explore Insider Transactions →
Official sources: Investor.gov: insider transactions and Forms 3, 4, and 5
Short Interest
FINRA short-interest reports · outstanding short positions
Find securities with large reported short positions, increases or decreases, and high days to cover. Select a reporting period or open a company to explore its available history.
FINRA collects short-interest positions twice a month. The settlement date is the date of the position snapshot; publication follows later. The figures aggregate reported positions in a security and do not identify individual short sellers.
Positions, volume, and float are different measures
Short interest measures outstanding positions. Daily short-sale volume measures trading activity and cannot be added up to reproduce it. The app’s Change % is the relative change in shares short, rather than the percentage of a company’s float sold short.
Days to cover relates shares short to average daily trading volume. It is a liquidity comparison, not a deadline or a prediction of a short squeeze. Trading volume and short positions may change after the snapshot. The app omits split-affected or inconsistent changes and unavailable or capped ratios; a dash should not be read as zero.
A company can have several shorted securities, such as two share classes, preferred shares or warrants. Company totals add up shares short across them. The combined change is shown only when every security’s change is comparable. Company days to cover is each security’s own ratio weighted by its shares short, because trading volume in one security cannot cover short positions in another; it is shown only when every security has a reported ratio.
Official sources: FINRA: equity short interest · FINRA: short-sale volume and its limitations
Fund Portfolios
Form N-PORT · portfolios of individual registered funds
Look inside tracked funds, explore their asset mix, and find companies gaining or losing fund holders. A fund page offers report-period selection, a Holdings | Filings switch, and reported flows and returns. Adviser links connect a fund to its manager where available.
N-PORT covers registered funds such as mutual funds and ETFs, with exceptions including money market funds. It can disclose bonds, foreign securities, and derivatives as well as equities. It describes an individual fund, while a manager’s 13F can combine positions across multiple accounts.
Public holdings arrive with a delay
Under the reporting regime currently in use, public portfolio snapshots generally cover the third month of a fund’s fiscal quarter and arrive about 60 days after quarter end. The presence of monthly flow or return figures does not make the holdings a monthly public feed. Use the report period shown; fund fiscal quarters can differ.
Understand the fund’s structure
Holdings default to equities when available. Choose All asset types to see other reported positions. A feeder fund may hold another fund rather than the underlying securities; derivatives and short positions can make simple weight totals misleading.
Weights are the filed percentages of net assets. Weight changes are percentage-point differences, and comparisons use consecutive comparable reports of the same fund. Missing comparisons remain blank. An amended report can replace an earlier report for the same period.
Counts of funds holding a company describe the tracked funds in the displayed scope, not a combined ownership percentage. Fund weights cannot be added across funds. Net flows describe money entering and leaving the fund; monthly returns may differ by share class and are separate from flows.
Official sources: SEC: Form N-PORT data and coverage · SEC: fund reporting requirements · SEC: delay to the monthly reporting changes
Reading dates, changes, and percentages
A few distinctions apply throughout the app
Start with the date
Report period or As of dates describe a position snapshot. Transaction date describes when a reported transaction occurred. Filed describes when it was submitted. A recent filing can describe an older position, and a recently updated page can still contain delayed disclosures.
Market prices and market capitalisations come from separate market-data sources. Their dates can differ from the filing’s date. Chart markers show the disclosed event or reporting period indicated by the chart; they do not establish the investor’s exact execution price.
Know the denominator
- 13F weight: position value ÷ the manager’s reported long-share portfolio value × 100. It measures concentration within that reported portfolio.
- Ownership stake: the reported beneficial ownership percentage of the relevant company share class. This is a different measure from portfolio weight.
- Weight or stake change: a move from 4% to 5% is an increase of 1 percentage point, even though the relative increase is 25%.
- Fund net flow: reported sales of fund shares + reinvested distributions − redemptions. This describes flows into the fund, rather than its trading in portfolio companies.
Missing data and changing history
A dash can mean a value is missing, not applicable, or cannot be compared reliably. No matching records means none are available in the app’s current coverage and filters; it does not establish that no holding or transaction exists.
Amendments, source corrections, and improved company matching can change historical tables. Different share classes or securities may have different ownership records. Read any coverage or validation note and use the original source for details that a summary cannot capture.
For the terms governing use of the information, see the Disclaimer.