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If you are using 13F data to prospect into the RIA market, the filing cadence is one of the most important mechanics to understand. How often filings are updated determines how fresh your intelligence is… and how quickly you can act on it. The short answer is quarterly. But the details matter more than most teams realize.
In this article, we cover how the 13F filing calendar works, what the 45-day lag actually means for your outreach strategy, and how Dakota Holdings keeps your team working from current data rather than stale filings.
13F Filings Are Filed Quarterly
Every institutional investment manager with $100 million or more in Section 13(f) securities must file a 13F four times per year, once for each calendar quarter. The four reporting periods and their deadlines are:
- Q1 (January 1 – March 31): filing due by May 15
- Q2 (April 1 – June 30): filing due by August 14
- Q3 (July 1 – September 30): filing due by November 14
- Q4 (October 1 – December 31): filing due by February 14
Each filing reflects the manager's holdings as of the last day of the quarter. That means a Q1 filing shows positions as of March 31, filed up to 45 days later in mid-May.
The 45-Day Lag and Why It Matters
The 45-day window between quarter end and filing deadline is the most important timing constraint in 13F data. By the time a filing is publicly available, the positions it reflects are already up to six weeks old. In a fast-moving market, that gap can be significant.
For distribution teams, the lag has two practical implications.
First, a position you see in a freshly filed 13F may have already changed. An RIA that shows a new interval fund position in a May filing held that position as of March 31. By the time you call, they may have added to it, reduced it, or exited entirely. The filing is a snapshot, not a live feed.
Second, the lag creates a timing advantage for teams that move quickly. Most distribution teams wait until filings are fully processed and loaded into their tools before acting. The teams that build an outreach calendar around filing deadlines, and reach out in the weeks immediately following each filing window, are working from the freshest data available. That is a meaningful edge in a competitive channel. The quarterly filing calendar is one of the most underused timing tools in RIA distribution.
Dakota’s holdings processes every 13F filing, including amendments, so your team is always working from the most current data available. Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace.
What Changes Between Filings
Because 13F data updates four times a year, the quarter-over-quarter comparison is where the real intelligence lives. A single filing tells you what a firm owns. Two or more filings tell you what a firm is doing, and that is a fundamentally more useful signal for prospecting.
The changes worth tracking between filings:
- New positions. A holding that appears for the first time signals a firm that has just cleared internal approval for a new allocation. That is a narrow, high-value window. Understanding what actually qualifies as a reportable position helps your team read those new entries correctly.
- Position increases. A holding that grew meaningfully from one quarter to the next indicates building conviction. A firm adding to a position is a different conversation than a firm holding a static allocation.
- Position reductions. A holding that declined quarter over quarter, particularly a sustained decline across multiple filings, signals a firm moving away from a manager or strategy. That is a competitive opening.
- Exits. A position that disappears entirely from one filing to the next is a firm that has fully reallocated. If that exit is in your category, you need to understand why. If it is in a competitor's product, it may be an opening.
Amendments and Late Filings
The quarterly schedule is the standard, but two exceptions are worth knowing.
1. Amended Filings
A manager can file an amended 13F after the original deadline to correct errors or omissions. Amendments appear on EDGAR under the same filing type and can materially change the picture of what a firm holds. Raw data pipelines that do not account for amendments may be working from an incomplete record.
2. Confidential Treatment Requests
In limited cases, managers can request that certain holdings be omitted from the public filing for a period of time. These requests are granted at the SEC's discretion and are relatively rare, but they mean that some positions are temporarily invisible even in a correctly filed 13F. The structural problems with raw 13F data go deeper than most teams expect… amendments and confidential treatment are two of the reasons a raw SEC feed is not the same as a clean, actionable dataset.
How Dakota Marketplace Handles the Filing Cadence
Dakota’s holding data ingests 13F filings as they are released and processes them through a seven-step enrichment workflow before they reach your team. That includes picking up amended filings, not just originals, so your data reflects corrections as they happen rather than locking in a snapshot from the original deadline.
The quarter-over-quarter comparison view is built in. Your team can see new positions, position changes, and exits across your entire prospect universe without manually pulling and comparing individual filings. Every position is tagged by asset class, sub-asset class, vehicle type, and filing period… and connected to verified contacts at each firm.
For distribution teams building an outreach calendar around the quarterly filing cycle, that means each new filing window produces a fresh, prioritized prospect list rather than a research project.
Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace to see how the quarterly filing cadence translates into a signal-driven outreach workflow.
