June 2024

In June, we focused on enhancing our allocator data and tagging. 79% of our allocator holdings are now mapped to a manager in our system, up from about 30% a year ago. We expect this to continue to increase as we add more managers to the system that are already tagged in our data. In addition, 31% of the managers in OWL now have a disclosed investment from an allocator. We expect that number to increase as we continue to build our allocator database.

We also added 1,618 managers to the platform in June, bringing the total number of managers to 10,109 as of month end.

A big priority for June was updating and enhancing our allocator profile pages. In addition to basic information (AUM, location) and holdings when available, allocator profiles now include a description, website, LinkedIn pages, etc., similar to our manager profiles. The release at the end of June was our first iteration, and we expect these profiles to continue to improve over time as we pull in more data.

On allocator holdings pages, users are now able to see beyond the two years of history that we previously showed. For any investment into a manager, you can click on the current investment amount and see the history of changes going back several years.

For allocators with holdings and mappings to OWL managers, we’ve added a portfolio view that shows an equal-weighted view of the portfolio, including performance and exposures across the portfolio:

Shorts, especially in Europe, are some of the highest quality filings in the world. In June, we added in the ability to see a manager’s disclosed short positions on their portfolio pages by clicking on the “Short” tab:

For any given stock, users can now also see the managers that are short by selecting the “Short” tab as well:

We think knowing what stocks a manager is short is an incredibly valuable data point when doing diligence, and we expect to further integrate this information into the OWL platform over time. As a reminder, all returns shown in OWL are still the returns of the manager’s publicly disclosed long positions.

To help in manager search and discovery, we’ve added several filters to the main manager scorecard. Users can now filter for data points like confidence score, position count, and market value when searching for managers. As a reminder, we added the confidence scores in April based on user feedback, to help users understand how close OWL’s estimate returns might be to the manager’s actual returns:

In June, we also improved a number of features in OWL to be more user-friendly. A couple of examples of that include faster loading times for the location search (especially in very popular places like New York City) and the historical shares view. We also updated the site’s search functionality to make it easier to find a given manager, allocator, or stock using the first few letters of the name. On the historical shares view, we also added the ability to search within the positions to more easily isolate a given stock. Many of these smaller improvements, in addition to the larger feature releases, were based on user feedback and suggestions. Please keep sharing your ideas and pain points and we will continue to build those ideas into our product roadmap!

May 2024

During May, we added 1,170 managers, bringing the total number of managers in OWL to ~8,500. With those managers came 300,000 new public equity positions. We also updated our ADV data to include Q1 data. Managers are required to file their annual ADV by 3/31, so this was a significant data update, highlighting how managers’ businesses have changed over the past year.

Our location search feature that we launched in March now includes the option to filter by manager type (hedge fund, venture capital, etc.). We will continue to add additional tags and filters here in the coming months to enable users to further refine their search results to what is most relevant for them.

On the list of funds disclosed by each manager, we added “NEW” tags to make it easier to identify which funds are new in the manager’s most recent filing. In addition, we added a column to note the first time a fund appeared in a manager’s ADV.

As a reminder, users can create custom groups of managers in OWL’s “My Portfolio” section in order to aggregate their returns and exposures. From a formatting perspective, we launched a significant refresh to the portfolio pages to make them faster and easier to read.

As we’ve added managers into OWL and collected more data, we’ve been able to tag more of the allocators’ holdings to managers. More than 90% of our allocator holdings are now tagged to a specific manager, up from about 30% a year ago.

For managers with public equity positions, we simplified the portfolio snapshot that you see on the dashboard by removing a few columns and converting the “Increase”/”Decrease” tags into a column showing the manager’s recent activity in the stock:

For each manager, users can see their historical portfolio of public equity positions and how that has changed over time. For managers with a large number of positions, it can sometimes be difficult to locate a particular stock, so we added a search feature on the page that enables users to search for a company and filter the table to only show those results.

We made a number of changes to make the site faster, with some pages loading up to 80% faster than previously. In addition, we added csv, png, and svg download options to several key charts so that users can easily export the data.

We also updated formatting across a few key charts, including manager returns, in order to make them more easily readable. All returns now use the same format across the site.

April 2024

April was focused on significantly scaling the data on the platform. During the month, we added 3,386 managers, 270k positions, and nearly 300k people. At the end of the month, we had 7,325 managers in OWL.

Based on user feedback, we added ‘Confidence Scores’ for OWL’s estimated manager returns. Confidence scores guide users on how likely it is that OWL's return estimate is close to the manager's actual return, based on comparing the disclosed market value of open positions against reported AUM values. As a reminder, return estimates in OWL are estimates based on disclosed longs. In many cases they are quite close, but there is a spectrum on which that falls. The confidence score shows up next to the manager return tables in OWL, as seen below, and will soon be a factor that users can filter by when using the various search tools in OWL:

Each manager’s summary section now includes tags to show the type of manager, including labels like hedge fund, private equity, or venture capital. This is just the first phase of tagging – we plan to further expand and refine these in the future, while also incorporating them into search features so that users can quickly identify and filter by the type of manager.

For managers that disclose public equity positions, their top 10 are a key feature of the manager dashboard. To enable users to quickly see where managers are increasing or decreasing positions, we added color-coded indicators to show recent changes. You can also click “View All” to see a manager’s entire publicly disclosed portfolio, including recently exited positions.

Digging a little deeper into a manager’s portfolio, for any manager position you can click in to see a full history of buys and sells, including their percentage ownership of the company over time.

We’ve also added a few new ways to further explore the different funds each manager has, including internal ownership of each fund over time. In March, we added data showing all of the funds a given manager discloses, enabling users to see when new funds were launched or closed. In April, we added the ability to see how much of each fund is internal capital (typically defined as employees and related parties), and how that has changed over time.

Users can also click on an individual fund and see how that internal ownership percentage has changed over time, eliminating the effect of changes in valuation.

Fund managers are also required to disclose key executives on an annual basis, along with their ownership percentage of the overall firm. For any manager in our database, you can see not only the current key executives and their ownership status, but how that has changed over time:

We have made significant updates to make the location features more mobile-friendly for users that are on the go. While traveling, users can now more easily navigate the mapping features that enable them to find managers in a given location, including filters by manager type and AUM. Additionally, we added download capabilities for all tables across the site, enabling users to use and manipulate the data in ways that work for their daily workflows and processes.

March 2024

We ended March with 3,939 managers in OWL. New manager additions were primarily focused on managers that filed a 13F for the first time and additional PE/VC managers. We also cleaned up and removed ~500 entities, that, while they file some sort of disclosure of public positions, are not fund managers. Many of these were individuals in countries like Japan and India, whose positions are not relevant to our users. The net manager additions resulted in an additional 20K positions and 150k people on the platform.

In March, we also focused on mapping as many managers as possible to ADVs – following that process, 84% of managers in OWL are mapped to an ADV, enabling easy access to data like official Regulatory AUM over time and detail on funds managed by each manager.

Users now have more customization options on the manager returns chart found on each manager’s dashboard. In addition to choosing the timeframe, users can now choose custom indices, as well as add additional managers’ returns to the charts for a quick comparison.

We heard from many users that being able to search and filter managers by location was a critical part of their research process. Whether traveling to see managers or just trying to find managers in a given geography, this is important data to allocators. In March, we launched the first iteration of our location search, with additional filters and functionality to come soon. We think this feature will make planning your next trip so much easier!

In addition to the list of current funds managed by an OWL manager, users can now see how those funds have changed over time and when new funds were launched or closed. This gives allocators insight into how a manager’s business is changing and growing (or shrinking), beyond the information that they may have about a few specific funds that they are invested in:

With almost 4,000 managers in OWL (and thousands more to come!), the platform can easily provide suggestions for “similar managers” based on correlations among our estimated return streams (which, as a reminder, are based on publicly disclosed long positions). We recently re-vamped this screen to show the correlations with all managers with disclosed long positions in OWL rather than just the few most correlated, and also added the ability to customize the managers shown in the chart:

On the flip side, users can also use this feature to find managers that are least correlated with a given manager, potentially providing some portfolio diversification.