Thomson Reuters institutional (13F) holdings: the s34 database (licensed)
Access confirmed (licensed) Jun 9, 2026 · via live Thomson Reuters institutional 13F query (tfn.s34) through a licensed WRDS session
The Thomson Reuters / Refinitiv Institutional (13F) Holdings database
(WRDS table family: s34) is a manager-by-quarter panel of US
institutional equity holdings, built from mandatory SEC Form 13F disclosures.
Each record captures a reporting manager’s long US equity positions (shares
held and market value) as of each quarter-end, along with a manager-type
classification. It is a common source in institutional-ownership and
corporate-finance research: used in, for example
Falato & Scharfstein
for the stock-market and bank-risk analysis (institutional ownership channel),
and
Guernsey, Guo, Liu & Serfling
for the evolution of institutional ownership over thirty years.
- Cost: licensed (via WRDS). No free cleaned tier.
- Vendor: Thomson Reuters / Refinitiv (LSEG).
- Coverage: 13F-reporting institutions (managers above the 13F AUM threshold) quarterly from 1980; US long equity positions only.
Access (when licensed)
Section titled “Access (when licensed)”- Through WRDS. The common academic path uses the
s34table family on WRDS; see WRDS / CRSP / Compustat for the connection recipe. - Raw from SEC EDGAR. The underlying Form 13F filings are freely available from EDGAR, but they are un-cleaned, delivered in raw XML or text with uncleaned CUSIPs, and are not a drop-in substitute for the Thomson/Refinitiv tables.
- Credentials are required for the Thomson/Refinitiv tables on WRDS. Keep
them in
.env, never hard-coded.
Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)
Section titled “Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)”These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented.
- Coverage gaps and stale holdings, worse in the later sample. A data-quality literature (Ben-David, Franzoni, Moussawi, and others) documents that the Thomson/Refinitiv 13F series has coverage gaps and stale or carried-forward holdings, and that its coverage of filings degraded relative to the raw SEC 13F filings in the later part of the sample (Ben-David, Franzoni, Moussawi, and Sedunov, 2021, date a sharp increase in stale and dropped holdings to around 2013, with roughly 10% underreporting by 2015). Holdings can be carried forward across quarters, and the report date (rdate) versus file date (fdate) labels can be misaligned. Validate against the raw SEC EDGAR 13F filings, especially for recent years, before relying on the series.
- 13F covers only long US equity above the threshold. Short positions, positions below the per-security reporting threshold, non-equity holdings, and managers below the $100 million AUM threshold are all absent. The database does not represent total ownership; aggregate holdings from it will fall short of float.
- The manager-type (typecode) classification is unreliable and frozen. The typecode field (bank, insurance, mutual fund, etc.) is known to be inaccurate for many managers and was not updated as institutions changed structure. Do not use typecode splits without re-classifying from an independent source.
- The manager identifier (mgrno) is not stable across mergers. When institutions merge or rename, mgrno assignments can break continuity. The mgrno is also separate from security identifiers; linking to CRSP requires the s34-to-CRSP link table and careful CUSIP handling (including CUSIP changes over time).
- Confidential-treatment filings and amendments create gaps. Managers may receive confidential treatment on individual positions, delaying or omitting those holdings from the public (and therefore the database) record. Amendments also mean the same quarter can have multiple filing vintages.
- Raw EDGAR 13F filings differ structurally from the WRDS tables. Raw filings use uncleaned CUSIPs, inconsistent formatting, and lack the manager-type and numeric identifiers the Thomson tables supply. They are a source for independent verification, not a cleaned substitute.
Citation
Section titled “Citation”Cite the Thomson Reuters / Refinitiv Institutional (13F) Holdings database (s34), accessed via WRDS, stating the data vintage, the date of access, how coverage gaps and stale holdings were handled (exclusion, supplementation with the raw SEC EDGAR 13F filings, or restriction to a period less affected), and how the typecode classification was treated (whether typecodes were used as-is or re-classified from an independent source).