Fewer names than anyone guesses.
Ask a room of advisers how many listed shares a family office holds and you will hear hundreds. The filings say otherwise. These books are short, and they have been short for years.
16
listed names in the middle book of the newest quarter on file. A quarter of these offices hold 7 or fewer; the widest tenth hold 118.
How many listed names does a family office hold?
The middle of this cohort would fit on one page. That is not a small office holding a starter portfolio: it is what families with the scale to file look like once you count the lines rather than the dollars.
| Listed names held | Lowest tenth | Lower quarter | Middle | Upper quarter | Highest tenth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Names held | 3 | 7 | 16 | 48 | 118 |
Counted by weight rather than by line, the books are shorter still. Spread the same money evenly and the middle book behaves like 7 names, not 16. Every name after that is doing very little work.
What does that mean for the book you run?
Two readings, and only one of them is comfortable. If your listed sleeve is longer than this, the extra names are probably not diversification — they are positions too small to change anything and too many to watch. If it is shorter, you are in ordinary company, and the question is simply whether the few you hold are the few you chose.
Either way the useful number is not the count. It is how much of the money, and how much of the risk, the top of the list is carrying — and those are two different lists.
What this count cannot tell you.
- Only listed shares held long are reported. Private funds, direct deals, property, cash, debt, fees and tax are all outside the filing.
- A filing is a photograph of one day, published up to 45 days later. It cannot show what was bought and sold in between.
- Only offices above the reporting threshold appear at all, so the cohort skews larger than the category.
- No prices are licensed here, so nothing in this cohort is a return, a ranking, or a backtest. Holdings facts only.
- A name is a line in a filing, not a bet. Two lines can be the same exposure held twice, and a filing will not say so.
How the cohort was assembled.
A screen proposed 51 filers as candidate family offices. A person read every one: 40 were accepted, 7 were rejected as something else, and 4 were left open because the evidence did not settle it. Only the accepted ones are in any figure on this page.
That is 874 filings and 61,471 reported positions across 22 quarters, each one read as of the day it became public rather than with the benefit of hindsight. A filing that arrived late is missing from its quarter instead of being back-filled into it.
The cohort is other firms' public quarterly filings, read as they stood on the day each one became public. It is not our clients, not their data, and not a performance record. Counts as at 19 September 2026.
Public filings only, and only the part of a book they cover: listed shares held long. No private holdings, no cash, no debt, no fees, no tax. Offices that stopped filing stay in every figure. Nobody here is named. Figures above are computed from the filings themselves, as they stood on 2026-09-20. A record and an analysis, not investment, tax or legal advice; decisions rest with the family and its advisers.