FactSet LionShares: institutional ownership (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

FactSet LionShares is a paid subscription, so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no FactSet credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

FactSet LionShares (now delivered as FactSet Ownership) is a commercial source for institutional and fund equity holdings. It assembles holdings from regulatory filings (US 13-F and equivalents) and fund disclosures into a position-level panel, and classifies each holder by type (mutual fund, hedge fund, pension, bank, insurance company, and so on). The Kwan, Liu & Matthies attention paper uses LionShares for institutional holdings and institution classification, which it needs to separate hedge funds from other investor types.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: FactSet.
• Coverage: global institutional and fund holdings (broader than US-only 13-F sources, which is part of the point), with holder-type classification.

Access (when licensed)

• Direct from FactSet. Through the FactSet workstation, the holdings/ ownership data feed, or the API, using FactSet entity identifiers.
• Via WRDS. Subscribing institutions can reach the FactSet ownership data through WRDS; query it like any other WRDS library and filter on date and security before pulling.
• Credentials are required either way. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Holdings are stale between report dates. Positions are observed at disclosure dates (quarterly for US 13-F, less often for many non-US holders). Between dates a position is carried forward, not live. Date your panel to actual report dates and do not infer intra-quarter trading.
• The 13-F lag and omissions. US 13-F positions are reported up to 45 days after quarter-end, and confidential-treatment requests let filers omit positions. The holdings you see lag reality and can be incomplete.
• Two levels, institution and fund: do not double count. The same assets can appear at the managing-institution level and the individual-fund level. Pick the level your analysis needs and aggregate consistently.
• Holder classification is a mapping, with edge cases. The institution type (hedge fund, mutual fund, pension, etc.) is FactSet’s classification; multi-strategy and changing managers blur the lines. Inspect the type field rather than assuming a clean partition.
• Identifiers are FactSet’s own. Holders and securities use FactSet entity IDs; securities also carry CUSIP/ISIN/SEDOL. Build an explicit crosswalk to PERMNO/CIK rather than assuming a shared key.
• International coverage is less frequent and less complete than US 13-F, because non-US disclosure regimes differ; do not treat a global panel as uniformly dense.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, e.g.: FactSet Ownership (LionShares), FactSet Research Systems; data licensed and accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the holding level (institution vs fund) and the report dates used.