
Hedge Fund Data Site (13F filings) - love your ideas what to do with it - jonsteinberg
http://jonsteinberg.com/2010/04/whalewisdom-hedge-fund-data-site-13f-filings/
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anigbrowl

      1. Ads of some kind
      2. Cross-reference with campaign contribution data from FEC.gov or opensecrets.org
      3. I like maps
      4. ???
      5. PROFIT
    

Seriously though, politically active people love this kind of stuff and
although the number of people who like to pore over such data is small they
also love posting their findings which will result in regular waves - not many
sticky users, but you can probably pick up some revenue by CPI ads or
beachcombing the serious users with a freemium model.

The trick (if it doesn't consume too much in the way of resources) is to join
up the disparate information - even though interested researchers could use
your site and existing contributions databases to do so now, you'll only get a
footnote credit. If there's a nice way to cross-reference the 13f data with
other things, then they'll send people directly there, and a percentage of
them will surf around and then announce discoveries of their own in a me-too
fashion.

The reasons I think of political campaign contributions as a cross-reference:
political people tend to be obsessed; they're usually quite partisan, so once
they've found a resource they like such as yours, they tend to be loyal to it;
election cycles, like SEC declarations, take place on a fixed schedule and are
thus predictable (in terms of adwords or external marketing); interest is
growing in this issue after January's Supreme Court decision to remove limits
on corporate campaign spending.

Regarding maps, everyone likes them and they're more accessible than tables.
but I'm also thinking of more abstract maps, like using processing.js or
something to do dynamic node-based diagrams that would make it easy for people
to surf the data without consuming much in the way of server resources. I love
spreadsheets myself but that's because I'm OK at number crunching - for most
people it's the equivalent of trying to make a picture using a mouse and MS
Paint vs a tablet and Adobe Illustrator.

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anigbrowl
Oh, and find some underemployed quant to do monthly postings of whimsical high
level statistical analyses, like Nate silver does with election and polling
data, or that guy at OKCupid does with their dating website.

You know, 'which companies have statistically unusual shareholding
distributions?' or 'does geographical location influence trading/portfolio
composition, or only prices?' or 'why do so many/few funds hold x & Y at the
same time (where X & Y are similar companies or unusual combinations of
sectors)?'.

It doesn't have to be hardcore market intelligence, in fact it might be better
to be quirky unusual questions that make for good dinner-table chatter/blog
fodder.

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jakarta
I think looking at 13Fs is helpful but there are some caveats to the approach.

First, if a fund is known to trade pretty frequently/have tons of turnover,
the 13F might be bad to look at. In addition, many funds are not simply long-
only vehicles. A lot of them will be doing some shorting, stuff outside of the
US, or macro fixed income commodity currency strategies that wont be reflected
in the 13F positions.

Still, 13Fs are useful, especially from an idea-generation perspective.
Definitely a cool tool, I use something similar.

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dthakur
Take a look at alphaclone.com -- it is another startup centered around
replicating hedge fund performances from 13F filings.

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mjadallah
Thanks for the mention. Let us know if you guys have any questions. In a
nutshell, we make people better investors by taking them out of the stock
selection decision loop. Instead we let the worlds best investors pick the
stocks.

