How to find other investors stock holdings?

Question

It is possible to find the stock holdings of investors like Warren Buffet, but is it possible to find any listings of the stock holdings of common investors? Rather than picking stocks to invest in, it seems a good idea to simply pick good investors and invest in the stocks that they do. Alternatively, is there a listing of all stock transactions (buys/sells) which take place every day, including the buyer and the seller?

Answer 1

it is private...............

watch cnn and cnbc..or read the little book that beats the market........

Answer 2

Investors such as Buffet have to disclose most of their holdings due to the huge positions he takes, but the information will usually do you little good as it is not published until well after the fact.

Answer 3

Okay, so you see a guy with a Mercedes and a yacht and you hang around his garbage can and hope he doesn't have a good shredder ?

Instead go to  topten traders .com and see what about 3300 investors have in their portfolios...see what the top 10% have every month !

...and you won't be getting strange looks from the neighbors.

Answer 4

Only for investors who own more than 5 percent of a company.  You can see those in 13-D filings on the sec.gov website.  Or institutional investors like mutual funds.  Yahoo usually lists the top holders for each stock.

Answer 5

Hey Matthew,

I can understand your approach about wanting to follow the best investors.

However, I think that you can do better (yes, better) than these big investors by learning what they do, and applying the strategies yourself as opposed to following other investors.

I'm a big advocate of value investing (the same as Warren Buffett's approach to investing -- find great companies to invest in, buy them at the right price, and then sell only when they become overvalued...)

However, one of the most important part of value investing (and why it works) is that it goes COUNTER to the "follow the herd" mentality of what other people do when investing in stocks.

When many investors (especially the big Wall Street firms) are buying and selling to move the market one way or another, sometimes great companies get beaten down unjustly -- giving you the opportunity to buy this company at a great discount.  The reason you can is because while many people are selling (which is why the stock price is down...), you'll have the opportunity to buy -- going counter to the market trend.

Now, many of the best value investors do what I've just described, so it might sound good to just follow their lead.  However, there are a LOT of great smaller companies that can yield huge returns through a value investing approach that these big investors will never buy...

Why?  Because they are small to mid-cap stocks (their total worth is less than $1 billion, some even as low as $100 million...), and if any one of these huge investors came in to buy any portion of the stock, they'd be forced to file a 13-D to disclose that they've acquired 5% or more of the company, and price would shoot to the moon before they'd be able to take advantage of these values...

Even Warren Buffett thinks that the individual investor has a better chance of making huge returns through value investing for just this reason -- the independent investor can get into lower valued companies without being noticed and ride the wave when the market corrects itself.

The big name investors can't do this (because they're too big!), and following them would only reduce your ability to really take advantage of what value investing can offer.

Again, following the big dogs isn't a bad idea, but I think a better idea is to learn their approaches and become a truly independent investor (making your own decisions and not following the decisions of other investors).

Hope this helps, and good luck!!

Answer 6

stock holdings of common investors... No, people have a right to privacy.  I have no desire to know your net worth, social security number and bank account numbers, but many bad guys do.

Plus, how can you tell in the "common investor" you pick is a "good investor?"  You would have to follow their picks for 10 years or more.

But there is a way to find "good investors" and see how they have done over the years and what they almost currently hold (holdings can be up to 7 months old).  Check morningstar, or investment magazines, msn money or yahoo finance or many other sites for actively managed mutual funds that have beaten the total returns of a index fund of that same benchmark.  It doesn't have to beat the index every year, just enough to have a better 10 year return.  The investment sites also give the top 10 to 25 holdings of the fund.  If you want to see all the holdings, ask the fund company to send you the latest annual or semi-annual report.