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Both are SEC filings. Both disclose holdings. That's about where the similarity ends. A 13F and an N-PORT answer different questions, come from different filers, and show up on completely different schedules. Mixing them up leads to bad conclusions about what a firm actually owns and when.
Here's how they differ, and when to use each one.
The Quick Comparison
- Who files: A 13F is filed by institutional investment managers with $100 million or more in discretion. N-PORT is filed by the registered fund itself: most mutual funds, closed-end funds, and ETFs organized as unit investment trusts.
- Frequency: 13F is quarterly. N-PORT data is collected monthly, though it's currently filed with the SEC in quarterly batches.
- Public delay: A 13F becomes public up to 45 days after quarter-end. For N-PORT, only the third month of each quarter is public, and even that comes with an additional delay.
- What's disclosed: A 13F covers long positions in Section 13(f) securities only. N-PORT covers every holding in the fund, plus risk and liquidity metrics.
- Level of detail: A 13F reports issuer, share count, and value. N-PORT adds asset type, fair value, quantity, derivatives detail, interest rate risk, and a liquidity classification for every position.
- Who's exempt: 13F exempts natural persons investing solely for themselves. N-PORT exempts money market funds and Small Business Investment Companies.
Form 13F: The Manager's Snapshot
A 13F is filed by the manager, not the fund. It captures whatever that manager has investment discretion over, across every account and fund it runs, but only for holdings on the SEC's Official List of Section 13(f) securities. That means U.S.-listed equities, ETFs, and a handful of adjacent instruments. It says nothing about strategy, leverage, or risk exposure, just what's owned and how much.
Form N-PORT: The Fund's Full Portfolio
N-PORT is filed by the fund itself, not the manager, and covers everything in that fund's portfolio, not just a narrow list of eligible securities. It's built for the SEC to monitor systemic risk, not just ownership: funds with heavy debt exposure have to report interest rate and credit spread sensitivity, and every holding gets classified into one of four liquidity buckets, from highly liquid to illiquid. It's a far deeper look at what a single fund holds and how exposed it is, but only for that one fund.
The Practical Difference
If you want to know what a hedge fund, pension, or RIA holds across its entire book, a 13F is the right form, and the only one most of those filers submit. If you want to know exactly what's inside a specific mutual fund or ETF, down to derivatives exposure and liquidity risk, N-PORT is the deeper source, but it only exists for registered funds, and even then only a quarter of the year's data is public at any given time.
The two also rarely compete for the same filer. A hedge fund manager files a 13F. A mutual fund complex files N-PORT for each of its series. Where they overlap is with ETF sponsors and closed-end fund managers, who may show up on both: an N-PORT for the fund itself, and a 13F if the manager separately runs $100 million or more in discretionary accounts.
Rules in Flux for N-PORT
Unlike 13F, which has been stable for decades, N-PORT reporting is mid-transition. The SEC finalized amendments in 2024 that would move funds to true monthly public filing, but those haven't taken effect yet, with staggered compliance dates running from November 2027 to May 2028 depending on fund size. A February 2026 proposal would soften that change, extending the filing deadline and reverting to the current quarterly public disclosure model instead of full monthly transparency. Which version ends up in effect is still an open question.
How Dakota Marketplace Uses 13F Holdings Data
Because N-PORT is fund-level and only partially public, it's not the data set fund managers lean on for prospecting. A 13F, filed at the manager level and covering every account that manager runs, is the more useful trail for finding out who to actually call.
That's the layer Dakota Marketplace builds on. Every 13F filing is ingested daily and tagged by asset class and sub-asset class across a taxonomy of 19 asset classes and 236 sub-asset classes, then matched to a known allocator profile, whether that's a hedge fund, RIA, pension, endowment, or family office. Each filer is linked to confirmed, active contacts, so a filing turns into a name and an outreach path instead of a dead end.
Fund managers can filter Dakota's 13F holdings data by investment firm, product structure, AUM, asset class, sub-asset class, active or passive management, and filing period, with results flowing directly into Salesforce, HubSpot, Backstop, or DealCloud.
Book a demo to see how Dakota turns 13F filings into a prospecting list.
