Who owns who?

From time to time I worry about the difficulty of tracking down who exactly owns what in the world of big business. In what I think is the jargon, who is the beneficial owner of some entity in which you are taking an interest?

Then yesterday, the Financial Times ran an article about a huge purchase of Tesla shares by a company which was supposed to specialise in safe investments for insurance companies. This turned out to be a clerical error, albeit one which might be thought to be market moving.

But along the way, I learn that if you can afford an account with Bloomberg, you can find out who owns the shares in public companies. At least, that is how I read the snap above.

Also, that large investment companies in the US have to make something called 13F filings which enumerate the companies in which they have invested. Reference 3 tells you about the filings and reference 4 looks to supply the actual filings in the form of one zip file per quarter. The catch being that my laptop suggests opening the contents in Notepad, which falls down in a heap when you present it with 60Mb of data file. Maybe you need specialist software to actually get at the data. For another day.

References

Reference 1: Has Natixis made $17bn gain on a huge Tesla bet? (No): Adventures in Betteridge’s law and 13F filings - Robin Wigglesworth, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.bloomberg.com/uk. I believe that the Bloomberg terminals or accounts you need to get access to the real stuff are far too expensive for the general public. Financial Times yes, Bloomberg no.

Reference 3: https://www.sec.gov/divisions/investment/13ffaq. More than you want to know about 13F.

Reference 4: https://www.sec.gov/dera/data/form-13f. The whole story.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_13F. The short story.