What the funds you interview at actually own
Any institutional manager with more than $100m in US-listed equities has to file a Form 13F within forty-five days of each quarter end, naming every position, its market value and its share count. This is that filing for 95 managers, with the change against the previous quarter worked out beside it. Open a fund and you can see the ten names that carry the book, what it opened, and what it sold out of.
What a 13F is not. It reports US-listed long equity and nothing else: no shorts, no bonds, no cash, no non-US listings, and options only in a form no reader should try to price. It arrives forty-five days late, so a manager who sold in July still shows the position in a filing published in August. The real book is bigger than this and differently shaped. Say “their last filing showed” rather than “they own”, and the distinction will do you credit rather than damage.
1 manager in this cut, holding 2,950 reported positions worth $80.2bn between them at Q2 2026. Ranked by the size of the reported book.
What this set is doing in Q2 2026
Counted by managers, not by dollars. One large fund buying a name is a judgement; nine funds buying it is a crowd.
A name appearing in both the bought and the sold column is the useful one. It means the managers here disagree about it, and disagreement is where an interview question comes from.
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| Manager | Book | Positions | Top 10 | Largest position | Biggest buy | Biggest sell |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Balyasny Asset Management LLC | $80.2bn | 2,950 | 14% | Invesco QQQ TR 2.4% of the book · $2.0bn | Select Sector SPDR TR +$861m, a new position | State STR SPDR S&P 500 ETF T -$2.1bn |
How to read a fund before you meet it
Start with concentration. Ten names carrying sixty per cent of a book is a fund that takes a view and sits with it, and it will expect you to defend one idea rather than list five. Ten names carrying twelve per cent is a different job, and a different interview.
Then read the new positions and the exits, because those are the decisions somebody in the room argued for recently. Being able to say what a fund bought last quarter, and to have a view on whether it was right, separates you from the candidate who read the website. Pick one name, know the numbers behind it, and let them ask.
What each column means
- Book.
- The market value of everything on the 13F at the quarter end, which is the reported book and not the fund’s assets. Leverage, shorts, cash and anything held outside US-listed equity all sit outside it.
- Top 10.
- The share of the reported book in the ten largest positions. It is the fastest read on whether a manager concentrates or diversifies, and the one number worth memorising before an interview.
- Biggest buy and sell.
- The largest increase and the largest decrease in reported value against the previous filing. A position opened from nothing counts at its full size, and a position sold out of counts at what it was worth in the previous quarter.
- Missing values.
- A manager filing for the first time has no previous quarter to compare against, so its positions show no change. Where a ticker could not be matched to the CUSIP on the filing, the issuer name stands alone rather than carrying a guess.
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