Every quarter, institutions managing over $100M must disclose their US equity holdings on SEC Form 13F. The raw filings are public — but the signal isn't in any single 13F; it's in the change between quarters: what a fund added, trimmed, exited, or opened fresh. Computing that delta by hand across hundreds of holdings is the tedious part. Here's how to automate it.
What 13F data tells you (and what it doesn't)
13F shows long US equity positions as of quarter-end, filed up to 45 days later. It's a lagged, long-only snapshot — no shorts, no non-US assets, no intra-quarter trades. Used right, it's still one of the cleanest windows into what sophisticated institutions are accumulating or dumping.
The workflow
Step 1 — pull the holdings
Use 13F Tracker Pro to pull a filer's reported holdings for a quarter as structured JSON — issuer, CUSIP, shares, and market value — instead of parsing the raw EDGAR document.
Step 2 — compute the quarter-over-quarter delta
This is the part that matters. The 13F Holdings Delta Tracker does it for you: feed it a filer and it returns the changes between consecutive quarters — new positions, added, reduced, and sold-out — with share and value deltas. That's the smart-money signal, pre-computed.
Step 3 — schedule around filing windows
13Fs cluster near the 45-day deadline (mid-February, May, August, November). Schedule the delta tracker to run through those windows so you catch each filer's update as it lands, rather than checking manually.
Step 4 — cross-reference insider activity
Pair institutional deltas with Form 4 insider trades: when funds and insiders are both accumulating a name, the conviction signal is stronger.
What you can build with it
- Smart-money dashboard — track a watchlist of funds (e.g. well-known value or activist managers) and surface their biggest new buys each quarter.
- Crowding monitor — aggregate deltas across many filers to see which names institutions are piling into or fleeing.
- Idea generation — filter for high-conviction new positions (large % of a fund's book) as a research starting point.
Why automate instead of using a 13F website
Free 13F sites show you one filer at a time in a browser; paid platforms charge a subscription. Pulling the delta as structured data lets you run it across many filers, on your schedule, into your own model or dashboard — pay-per-result, no seat.
FAQ
How current is 13F data? Filings are due within 45 days of quarter-end, so the data is inherently lagged — schedule around those deadlines for the freshest picture.
Can I see what a fund sold, not just bought? Yes — the delta tracker reports reduced and sold-out positions alongside adds and new buys.
Does 13F include short positions? No — 13F is long US equity only. It won't show shorts, options strategies, or non-US holdings.
What does it cost? Pay-per-event on Apify — per result, no subscription.
Get started
Start with the 13F Holdings Delta Tracker, and see the full SEC Filing Data Tools guide for the surrounding toolkit.
Use with n8n
Prefer to automate this in n8n? These tools are available as open-source n8n community nodes -- install n8n-nodes-nexgendata and import the 13F holdings-change alert template. See Use NexGenData with n8n or get the package on GitHub.
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