By the time the number is public, the quarter is gone.
A holdings filing is a photograph of one day, developed up to 45 days later. It is the most reliable public record of what a family office owns, and it is always out of date. Both of those are worth knowing.
45 days
between the day a quarter ends and the day its filing has to be public. Every quarter in this cohort is read as of that deadline, never with hindsight.
What can a quarter-end snapshot actually tell you?
Three things, and it tells them well: what was held on one date, in what size relative to everything else held, and how that compares to the same date a quarter earlier. Structure, weight, and change in weight. That is enough to measure how short these books are and how much of the money sits at the top of them.
What it cannot tell you is anything about the road between two photographs. A position opened in April and closed in June was never held, as far as any snapshot is concerned. A family that doubled a position on the last day of the quarter looks exactly like one that held it patiently for five years.
Who is missing, and why, is part of the answer.
A record that quietly drops whoever did not report is the reason most peer numbers flatter. Missing is not one fact but two, and only the first is a gap: an office that owed a filing and had not made it by the deadline, versus an office that had not begun filing at all in that era.
Across the window reviewed for this cohort, 74 office-quarters were genuine late filings. Another 194 were offices that had not started filing yet. The first group stays in the denominator. The second was never in it.
In the newest quarter on file, 39 offices had filed by the deadline and 1 had not. The ones who had not are counted as late, not removed.
874 filings were read this way. The discipline costs you some data. It is the only way the number means what it says.
What this changes about the marks on your desk.
Every private capital account statement a family receives is the same object with a longer lag: six to ten weeks after a quarter that itself closed months ago. Allocation decisions, covenant tests and estate figures built on those marks inherit the lag, and the report rarely says so.
The useful habit is small. Ask of every figure in front of you: what date is this true as of, and what has happened since. A number without a date is not a number yet.
What this page is not claiming.
- 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.
- Reading at the deadline removes hindsight. It does not remove the chance that a filing was amended later, and an amendment is a different document with a later date.
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.