5 ms·

Hedge Fund Data Site (13F filings) - love your ideas what to do with it

7 points by jonsteinberg 16y ago

jakarta 16y ago
I think looking at 13Fs is helpful but there are some caveats to the approach. First, if a fund is known to trade pretty frequently/have tons of turnover, the 13F might be bad to look at. In addition, many funds are not simply long-only vehicles. A lot of them will be doing some shorting, stuff outside of the US, or macro fixed income commodity currency strategies that wont be reflected in the 13F positions. Still, 13Fs are useful, especially from an idea-generation perspective. Definitely a cool tool, I use something similar.
dthakur 16y ago
Take a look at alphaclone.com -- it is another startup centered around replicating hedge fund performances from 13F filings.
- mjadallah 16y ago
  Thanks for the mention. Let us know if you guys have any questions. In a nutshell, we make people better investors by taking them out of the stock selection decision loop. Instead we let the worlds best investors pick the stocks.
anigbrowl 16y ago
1. Ads of some kind 2. Cross-reference with campaign contribution data from FEC.gov or opensecrets.org 3. I like maps 4. ??? 5. PROFIT Seriously though, politically active people love this kind of stuff and although the number of people who like to pore over such data is small they also love posting their findings which will result in regular waves - not many sticky users, but you can probably pick up some revenue by CPI ads or beachcombing the serious users with a freemium model. The trick (if it doesn't consume too much in the way of resources) is to join up the disparate information - even though interested researchers could use your site and existing contributions databases to do so now, you'll only get a footnote credit. If there's a nice way to cross-reference the 13f data with other things, then they'll send people directly there, and a percentage of them will surf around and then announce discoveries of their own in a me-too fashion. The reasons I think of political campaign contributions as a cross-reference: political people tend to be obsessed; they're usually quite partisan, so once they've found a resource they like such as yours, they tend to be loyal to it; election cycles, like SEC declarations, take place on a fixed schedule and are thus predictable (in terms of adwords or external marketing); interest is growing in this issue after January's Supreme Court decision to remove limits on corporate campaign spending. Regarding maps, everyone likes them and they're more accessible than tables. but I'm also thinking of more abstract maps, like using processing.js or something to do dynamic node-based diagrams that would make it easy for people to surf the data without consuming much in the way of server resources. I love spreadsheets myself but that's because I'm OK at number crunching - for most people it's the equivalent of trying to make a picture using a mouse and MS Paint vs a tablet and Adobe Illustrator.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  Oh, and find some underemployed quant to do monthly postings of whimsical high level statistical analyses, like Nate silver does with election and polling data, or that guy at OKCupid does with their dating website. You know, 'which companies have statistically unusual shareholding distributions?' or 'does geographical location influence trading/portfolio composition, or only prices?' or 'why do so many/few funds hold x & Y at the same time (where X & Y are similar companies or unusual combinations of sectors)?'. It doesn't have to be hardcore market intelligence, in fact it might be better to be quirky unusual questions that make for good dinner-table chatter/blog fodder.

7 points by jonsteinberg 16y ago

I think looking at 13Fs is helpful but there are some caveats to the approach. First, if a fund is known to trade pretty frequently/have tons of turnover, the 13F might be bad to look at. In addition, many funds are not simply long-only vehicles. A lot of them will be doing some shorting, stuff outside of the US, or macro fixed income commodity currency strategies that wont be reflected in the 13F positions. Still, 13Fs are useful, especially from an idea-generation perspective. Definitely a cool tool, I use something similar.

dthakur 16y ago

Take a look at alphaclone.com -- it is another startup centered around replicating hedge fund performances from 13F filings.

mjadallah 16y ago
Thanks for the mention. Let us know if you guys have any questions. In a nutshell, we make people better investors by taking them out of the stock selection decision loop. Instead we let the worlds best investors pick the stocks.

anigbrowl 16y ago

1. Ads of some kind 2. Cross-reference with campaign contribution data from FEC.gov or opensecrets.org 3. I like maps 4. ??? 5. PROFIT Seriously though, politically active people love this kind of stuff and although the number of people who like to pore over such data is small they also love posting their findings which will result in regular waves - not many sticky users, but you can probably pick up some revenue by CPI ads or beachcombing the serious users with a freemium model. The trick (if it doesn't consume too much in the way of resources) is to join up the disparate information - even though interested researchers could use your site and existing contributions databases to do so now, you'll only get a footnote credit. If there's a nice way to cross-reference the 13f data with other things, then they'll send people directly there, and a percentage of them will surf around and then announce discoveries of their own in a me-too fashion. The reasons I think of political campaign contributions as a cross-reference: political people tend to be obsessed; they're usually quite partisan, so once they've found a resource they like such as yours, they tend to be loyal to it; election cycles, like SEC declarations, take place on a fixed schedule and are thus predictable (in terms of adwords or external marketing); interest is growing in this issue after January's Supreme Court decision to remove limits on corporate campaign spending. Regarding maps, everyone likes them and they're more accessible than tables. but I'm also thinking of more abstract maps, like using processing.js or something to do dynamic node-based diagrams that would make it easy for people to surf the data without consuming much in the way of server resources. I love spreadsheets myself but that's because I'm OK at number crunching - for most people it's the equivalent of trying to make a picture using a mouse and MS Paint vs a tablet and Adobe Illustrator.

anigbrowl 16y ago
Oh, and find some underemployed quant to do monthly postings of whimsical high level statistical analyses, like Nate silver does with election and polling data, or that guy at OKCupid does with their dating website. You know, 'which companies have statistically unusual shareholding distributions?' or 'does geographical location influence trading/portfolio composition, or only prices?' or 'why do so many/few funds hold x & Y at the same time (where X & Y are similar companies or unusual combinations of sectors)?'. It doesn't have to be hardcore market intelligence, in fact it might be better to be quirky unusual questions that make for good dinner-table chatter/blog fodder.