Berkshire's Q2 13F lists Apple across 12 separate rows, Appaloosa's 835,000 Apple "shares" are puts, and Third Point's 3,500,000 Riot "shares" are bonds. Three columns in the raw filings.
The Q2 13Fs were due on 14 August. Rule 13f-1 gives managers 45 days after quarter end, so this batch describes where portfolios stood on 30 June. I went through the raw XML on a few of them instead of a summary, and there are three columns in the information table that decide what a row actually means. All of it is checkable, the files are sitting on EDGAR.
One row is not one position.
Berkshire's filing has 89 rows. Those 89 rows cover 29 distinct CUSIPs, and 19 of the 29 show up on more than one row.
Apple is on twelve of them. Added together it is 227,917,808 shares, about $66bn at the filing's own valuation. The largest single row is 80,664,820 shares. The smallest is 34,000. The first Apple row in the file is 692,000, which is three tenths of one percent of the position.
The rows split because the cover page declares 14 "other included managers" and names every one of them, and each row lists which of them holds it. Coca-Cola is spread across 10 rows and comes to exactly 400,000,000 shares. Bank of America is 8 rows and 483,394,015. Manager number 13 on that cover page is Nebraska Furniture Mart, which holds 1,399,713 shares of American Express and 960,000 of Coca-Cola.
A "Put" column sits right next to a share count that looks long.
Appaloosa's filing has a row reading APPLE INC, title of class COM, 835,000, type SH, value $241,615,600. Every visible field on that row reads like a stake. The putCall column says Put. There is a second one further down, Berkshire Hathaway class B, 25,000 shares, also a put.
Nothing else in the row tells you. Read the amount and the value and skip that column and you have Appaloosa long a quarter of a billion dollars of Apple, when the filing says the opposite.
The amount column is not always shares.
Third Point's filing has two rows where the type is PRN instead of SH. Riot Platforms 0.750% notes, 3,500,000 PRN, value $7,033,950. Lithium Argentina 1.750% notes, 625,000 PRN, value $611,750. That is three and a half million dollars of face value of a convertible, not three and a half million shares.
What a 13F does not contain, which is a lot.
The SEC's own FAQ on the form says it plainly. Short positions are not reported at all, and you are not allowed to net them against a long in the same name, which is why a put shows up as a row and a short does not. Securities on non-US exchanges are not reported. Neither is cash, or debt that is not convertible.
So a 13F is a slice of a portfolio and never the portfolio, and a manager who looks like they exited may have moved into something the form does not cover. The 45 days matter for the same reason. This batch became public on 14 August describing 30 June, and nothing stopped any of it being sold on 1 July.
None of this is secret. It is just that the filing is a spreadsheet whose columns carry meaning, and two of the columns are much more obvious than the others. The thing I would actually like an answer to. The row split is not random, it maps to named entities on the cover page, so you can see that one Apple block sits with National Indemnity, another with GEICO, another with Buffett alone. Is that ever informative, or is it purely an artefact of which subsidiary's balance sheet the shares happen to live on? Has anyone found the sub-manager attribution worth tracking on its own?