What Are The Trends In 13Fs Showing Us?

This week marks the highly anticipated form 13F filing period for institutional investors with at least $100 million in equity assets under management. Traders and money managers are on high alert to see which stocks Wall Street whales have been buying and selling in the most recent quarter.

Here’s a rundown of what some of the biggest funds have been buying and selling and which stocks may be impacted this week.

How Important Are 13Fs?

“If you start to see large stakes being unwound in several 13Fs, it’s something to pay attention to, or if you see one name being accumulated across a lot of 13Fs,” TD Ameritrade senior trading specialist Shawn Cruz told Benzinga. “If you’re a longer-term investor, it can help guide you towards names you can look at.”

At the same time, Cruz said short-term traders should be careful with attempting to piggyback off 13F filers. The disclosures themselves will often trigger a knee-jerk reaction from the markets, but the fund managers themselves may have stopped buying or selling the stocks themselves months prior to the filing.

Trends Among Top Filers

The 13F headliner is always Wall Street icon Warren Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) (NYSE: BRK-B) filing.

“I wouldn't be surprising to see he continued to buy financials. The pullback in the sector presented a good buying opportunity, and if you're someone that builds stakes over time like Buffett, it's essentially dollar cost averaging,” said Cruz.

Cruz will be closely watching what Buffett does with top holding Apple, Inc. AAPL.

"We've had plenty of headlines about saturation in the smartphone markets, so it’ll be interesting to see if he takes the foot off the gas or continues to put his money to work there,” he said.

Investors will also be watching billionaire Leon Cooperman’s Omega Fund filing. Last quarter, Cooperman was mostly selling stocks, including tech giants Microsoft Corporation MSFT, Paypal Holdings, Inc. PYPL and Micron Technology, Inc. MU. Cooperman has been unloading his Netflix, Inc. NFLX shares for two consecutive quarters.

Value investor David Einhorn has been struggling in recent quarters, so investors will be watching for any potential changes in direction. In the last two quarters, Einhorn has been selling his stakes in Twitter, Inc. TWTR and Apple.

Bill Ackman is another popular fund manager likely to generate 13F headlines. In the past two quarters, Ackman’s Pershing Square has been buying United Technologies Corporation UTX and Lowe’s Companies, Inc. LOW and selling Automatic Data Processing ADP.

Stocks To Watch

WhaleWisdom compiled a heat map of the most and least popular stocks among 13F filers last quarter. The stocks are ranked based on several criteria, including total number of buyers and sellers, weighting of stocks in filers’ portfolios and number of top 10 holdings. Here were the three hottest stocks 13F filers were buying last quarter:

• Berkshire Hathaway
• Nike, Inc. NKE
• Workday Inc WDAY

These three stocks were the most commonly sold by 13F filers last quarter:

• Splunk Inc SPLK
• Automatic Data Processing
• The Coca-Cola Co KO

Related Links:

Q3 13F Roundup: How Buffett, Einhorn, Ackman And Others Adjusted Their Portfolio

What Is The Buffett Indicator?