One of the best exercises you can go through each quarter is to review your 13F/D/G filings and update your holder rollforward. Here is a template that makes this easy.
- Most shareholder databases are point in time. You can create your own rollforward of activity to track holders building or selling positions.
- You must have access to the shareholder data which comes from a service provider
- You can determine what level of ownership is important to you. For instance, your rollforward may only be 50,000 share positions and greater. You therefore will not track holders who own less than 50,000 shares. This is an easy way to be efficient.
- Including the average stock price allows for monitoring changes in the overall cost basis of your holders. This is important as you assess investor sentiment.
- Tracking your holders is never a perfect science. Therefore, you can track the “Undetermined” accounts by summing the detail you have for each period and comparing to your actual shares outstanding. Ideally, you want to manage this number to a certain range to ensure consistency. NOTE: this may be negative depending on the timing of the 13-F filings.
- Think of all of this information as purely color. Again, this is not a perfect science. Much of the accuracy is dependent on timing of 13-F filings.
