Slice and Dice Holdings Data For Insights Into Where Money Is Moving

WHERE’S THE SMART money going nowadays?

- ANIBAL ARRASCUE and DENISE COCHRAN

You can get detailed, substantive answers to a question like that on the Bloomberg terminal. Type “holdings library” in the command line of a screen and click on the HLIB – Holdings Library match in autocomplete. (The shortcut is {HLIB }.)

Holdings Library lets you analyze global holdings data. First, pick a dataset that you want to dig into. The ETFs dataset contains all equity holdings of exchange-traded funds from around the world. Similarly, Mutual Funds includes all the stock holdings of mutual funds.

Let’s drill down on the 13Fs dataset. Institutions that manage more than $100 million of U.S. equity assets are required to report their holdings quarterly in 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (A July SEC proposal would raise the threshold to $3.5 billion.) These filings are snapshots of the portfolios of institutions and how their composition changes quarter to quarter. What’s more, these reports can be aggregated in a number of ways so you can see what’s happening across entire swaths of the investing landscape.