13F vs N-PORT: Two Fund Disclosures, Explained

Two regimes, two different questions

The confusion usually starts with the word "fund." A 13F is not filed by a fund at all. It is filed by an institutional investment manager under Section 13(f) of the Securities Exchange Act, and it aggregates every account over which that manager exercises investment discretion. When Berkshire Hathaway's 13F drops, you are looking at the manager-level book, not one product. The trigger is size: $100 million or more in "13(f) securities," which in practice means US exchange-traded stocks plus certain options, convertibles, and ETF shares on the SEC's official list.

N-PORT comes from a different statute entirely. It is filed under the Investment Company Act by registered investment companies: mutual funds, ETFs, and closed-end funds. Money market funds are carved out and file their own form, N-MFP. The unit of disclosure is the individual fund, not the manager. A large complex therefore shows up in both regimes at once: each of its registered funds files N-PORT for its own portfolio, while the management company files one consolidated 13F covering everything it runs.

The practical consequence is the one that matters for traders: hedge funds appear only in 13F data. A private fund is not a registered investment company, so it never files N-PORT. That is why 13F season is the event it is. For most of the managers tracked on the investors leaderboard, the quarterly 13F is the only recurring public X-ray of the book. For how 13F sits next to the ownership forms (13D, 13G, Form 4), see 13F vs 13D vs 13G vs Form 4.

What a 13F shows, and what it hides

A 13F information table is a flat list of long positions. For each one you get the issuer name, security class, CUSIP, share count, reported market value, investment discretion, and voting authority. What is missing is famous: no short positions, no cash levels, no bonds (with narrow exceptions), no foreign-listed shares outside the SEC's covered list, and option positions that disclose the notional of the underlying shares rather than premium paid or strikes. A 13F is a long-only snapshot of the US equity sleeve, nothing more. How to read a 13F filing walks through the actual document, and how accurate is 13F data covers the failure modes, from amendments to stale filers.

Timing is the other defining constraint. The filing is due 45 days after each calendar quarter ends. For 2026 the deadlines are February 17, May 15, August 14, and November 16 (full calendar in 13F filing deadlines 2026). Most managers file at the wire, so a position you read about in mid-May could have been put on in early January and exited before you ever saw it.

The regime is also enormous in aggregate. In Arkolith's Q1 2026 dataset, 1,824 institutional filers reported 1.87 million long positions worth $53.7 trillion. The SEC's own Form 13F FAQ is the canonical reference for edge cases like shared investment discretion and confidential treatment requests, and Investor.gov's 13F explainer is a good plain-language primer.

What N-PORT shows, and when you actually see it

N-PORT replaced the older quarterly Form N-Q as part of the SEC's investment company reporting modernization, and it is a different class of document: structured, monthly, and close to a full accounting of the portfolio. A registered fund reports every position with identifiers (CUSIP, and ISIN or other identifiers where available), value, and percentage of net assets. It reports asset category and country exposure. For debt holdings it reports terms like coupon, maturity, and whether the instrument is in default. Derivatives come with counterparty and reference-instrument detail. The fund also reports securities lending activity, repo exposure, monthly total returns, and monthly flow figures. Some of what funds submit stays non-public by design, most notably the liquidity classification of each holding, which the SEC sees but you do not.

The catch is timing. N-PORT reports are prepared monthly, but public disclosure trails the reporting month by a matter of weeks. Under the original regime only the report for the third month of each fiscal quarter became public, and even that arrived well after the quarter closed; the SEC has since amended the rules to push more of the monthly reports into public view on a per-month delay, with compliance phased by fund size. If the exact lag matters to your pipeline, verify the current schedule on sec.gov rather than trusting any secondhand summary, this article included. The honest framing: N-PORT is far more granular than a 13F, but you are still reading the past. Raw filings are free to pull through EDGAR full-text search.

Side-by-side: 13F vs N-PORT

Read the table cynically and the trade-off is clean: 13F gives you the interesting filers with shallow detail, N-PORT gives you uninteresting filers (index funds rarely surprise anyone) with deep detail. Both are valuable; they are just not substitutes.

Which filing to use, when

If the question is "what are the best capital allocators doing," 13F is your dataset. Manager-level conviction, position sizing, and quarter-over-quarter deltas all live there. You can read a single manager like Warren Buffett's book, or flip the axis and aggregate across all 1,824 filers to see institutional ownership in one name, the way the holders panel on a stock page like NVDA does.

If the question is "what exactly does this mutual fund or ETF hold," including its bond sleeve, its derivative overlays, or its securities-lending program, N-PORT is the only document that answers it. It is also the better source for fund-level risk work, since it carries returns and flow data a 13F never will.

If the question is "what happened this week," neither form helps. Both are lagged by construction. The faster instruments are the ones with event-driven clocks: Form 4 insider filings land within 2 business days of the trade (Arkolith tracks 51,000+ insider transactions on this rail), Schedule 13D activist stakes within 5 business days, Form 3 within 10 days of becoming an insider, and Form 5 annual catch-ups within 45 days of fiscal year end. Academic work on 13F-based strategies has generally found that whatever signal exists decays with the disclosure lag, which is exactly why pairing the slow quarterly snapshot with the fast event-driven forms is the standard play.

Querying the institutional layer programmatically

Arkolith serves the 13F and insider cluster through one REST API and an MCP server, and every datapoint carries provenance back to the SEC EDGAR accession number it came from, so an agent can cite the primary filing instead of inventing one.

# List covered institutional managers
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" "https://arkolith.com/api/v1/funds"

# Resolve a name to an entity
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" "https://arkolith.com/api/v1/search?q=berkshire"

# Pull a manager's reported holdings by CIK
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" "https://arkolith.com/api/v1/funds/1067983/holdings"

Each holdings row resolves the CUSIP to a ticker where possible and links back to the source accession, so the chain from "Buffett added to this position" down to the signed filing is one hop. Current coverage centers on the 13F and insider streams; N-PORT documents live on the same EDGAR infrastructure and are freely retrievable there in the meantime. Key setup and the first call take a few minutes via the quickstart.

Frequently asked questions about 13F vs N-PORT

Do hedge funds file Form N-PORT?

No. N-PORT applies to registered investment companies, and hedge funds are private funds that are not registered under the Investment Company Act. The quarterly 13F, filed at the manager level, is the only recurring public disclosure of a hedge fund's long US equity book.

Which filing is more current, 13F or N-PORT?

Neither is current; both describe the past. A 13F arrives up to 45 days after quarter end, and N-PORT's public release also trails the reporting period by weeks. For timely signals, the event-driven forms are faster: Form 4 within 2 business days and Schedule 13D within 5 business days.

Why does the same firm appear in both 13F and N-PORT data?

Because the regimes slice the same organization differently. Each registered fund a complex runs files its own N-PORT, while the management company files one consolidated 13F aggregating every account it has discretion over. The 13F total will therefore rarely match any single fund's N-PORT.

Does a 13F show short positions or bonds?

No. The 13F covers only long positions in "13(f) securities," essentially US exchange-listed equities plus certain options and convertibles. Shorts, cash, and most fixed income are invisible, which is one reason a 13F should be read as a partial sketch of a portfolio rather than the portfolio itself.

This article explains public filings and data concepts. It is not investment advice.