More 13Fs worth reading

Back in May, I wrote about the flood of 13F filings that comes out every three months, most of which I largely ignore, simply because so many other people are looking what the so-called smart money — hedge funds like Citadel and others are buying. I’m much more interested in the 13Fs filed by other publicly traded companies to disclose their positions. Since 13Fs are filed every three months, I decided see what the August crop of 13Fs had to say:

• • All told, 12 publicly traded companies filed 13Fs this time around. Five years ago, only 5 companies did this, according to Dotdadda, an AI tool that I used to help with this research. This doesn’t include publicly traded asset management or investment companies like Berkshire Hathaway or BlackRock.
  • Alphabet, NVIDIA and AMD all disclosed large stakes in newly public SpaceX. Because these filings cover the period ended June 30 and because SpaceX only went public on June 12, this was the first public disclosure of how much SpaceX stock these other companies own. According to Alphabet’s filing, the company owned 551 million shares of SpaceX. In the 10-Q that Alphabet filed on July 23, it said that it had “net gains on equity securities of $99.0 billion, primarily related to unrealized gains in our equity securities portfolio from SpaceX and a private company.” We won’t know until November how much of those 551 million shares it still owns. Nvidia’s stake in SpaceX was worth $21 billion as of the end of June and AMD disclosed owning $565 million. AMD’s position may pale when compared with Alphabet and Nvidia, but it was still their largest position by far.
  • This was only the third time that AMD has filed a 13-F, despite being a public company for over 50 years. In addition to SpaceX, it added positions in both Nutanix and Cerebras Systems, another newly public company that went public in mid-May. According to the 13F, AMD owned 3.3 million shares of Cerebras, which were valued at $566 million.
  • Delta Airlines filed a 13-F with just three positions all related to its primary business of aviation: Joby Aviation, Republic Airways and WheelsUp. During the quarter, it dramatically pared its holdings to 13.2 million shares compared with the 263 shares it disclosed for the March 31 filing.
  • In addition to tech and aviation, several large pharmaceutical companies also filed 13Fs including Johnson & Johnson, Regeneron and Pfizer all filed 13Fs for the quarter. Pfizer and Regeneron only started doing this at the beginning of 2025, while JNJ has a longer history dating back to 2021. Like the airline companies, most of these investments are in smaller pharmaceutical or biotech companies.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the circular economy where the same few companies keep doing business with one another to make it seem like business is booming. This was a pretty well-documented problem back in the early 2000s that I wrote about in my book. Are we there again? I don’t have enough information to make that call. But this current crop of 13Fs is certainly one indicator.