September 2024

In September, we launched email alerts, expanded our people data, and improved search and several other features across the platform.

We're thrilled to announce the launch of our email alert system. We have billions of data points about managers and allocators in OWL, and email alerts substantially improve the OWL experience by providing proactive updates about events our users care about. Alerts currently include team changes and public equity transactions detected in our global ownership database. Future alerts will include business updates (from Form Ds and ADVs), allocator disclosures, relevant news/articles, and more.

Alerts will begin to go out broadly this week. Users are encouraged to create a "My Portfolio" to start receiving these alerts for the managers on your custom lists. If you have any questions on how to do that, please reach out!

Create a Portfolio Here

Our people database has grown significantly and now tracks over 1 million current and former employees at investment managers! On the back end, we have a new process that will enable us to keep our data up-to-date and continue to add new people quickly and easily. Some quick stats on our current data:

• Over 1 million individual profiles with more than 1.7 million unique email addresses
• 10,538 managers with updated people data
• Over 6 million work experiences recorded

The additional data and improved processes will allow for more comprehensive tracking of team movements and industry trends across teams.

We made several improvements to the site’s organization and search functionality to enable users to find and share information more efficiently.

On OWL’s allocator profiles, we added tags for allocator types, such as Endowments, Foundations, etc. Clicking on a tag will create a filtered list of allocators of that type.

We also added additional ways to filter our database of allocators, which includes over 2,000 allocator profiles today. OWL users can now easily filter based on type of allocator, size, location, and holdings availability. For example, a user can quickly search for endowments with more than $500 million in assets and holdings that are available in OWL:

Several sections in a manager’s profile include multiple tabs of data. We improved the structure of the site so that users can now share a specific tab with colleagues via a unique URL, rather than the whole page. As an example, users could share a link for the “Hires” tab below. We plan to add additional sharing features in the coming months, including the ability for colleagues to share directly in the platform.

We continue to improve download capability across the site. This month, we improved our stock chart downloads, updating the formatting and adding the security name to the download:

We're excited about several features in development:

• Expanded email alerts, including Form D data, which will highlight new capital raised by a manager.
• Improved search functionality, including additional filters and tags for managers and allocators.
• Continued improvements to data timeliness and coverage, adding some new data sources (more to come in future updates!)

August 2024

In August, we focused on expanding the depth of our data with the addition of Form D filings, improving our soon-to-be-released email alert system, and refining our search functionality. Below, you’ll find detailed information on these enhancements, along with links to explore the new features directly within your OWL dashboard.

In our quest to capture all publicly available data about managers, we’ve added Form D data to OWL. As a reminder, companies and managers must file a Form D with the SEC when they sell unregistered securities, including when a manager raises capital for a fund. This is a massive data set – we currently have nearly 650,000 filings going back to 2008.

With this data we’ve enabled two initial views:

• You can now see how much capital a manager has raised YoY on the “Capital Raised” tab in the Funds section of the manager profile. Note that the annual numbers are estimates for each specific year – the filings in each year represent capital raised in the last 12 months, which may include part of the prior year. This is also gross capital raised and does not account for any redemptions.

View the Capital Raised Data Here.

• You can also search all Form D filings from the past 90 days using the Form D Feed, located on the main lefthand sidebar. For instance, you can see recent hedge fund launches that have raised capital, including amount raised and minimum investment required:

View the Form D Feed Here.

Form Ds are a really exciting new data set for us, and we expect to add more features using this data throughout the year. Form Ds are often the first public disclosure for a new manager (even before a 13F or ADV) – a great source for allocators to find new managers before they are well-known. More features for that use case coming soon!

Based on feedback from our customers, we are focused on launching email alerts in the coming weeks. For users that have set up custom portfolios of managers, these alerts will give you timely information about changes in your managers’ positions and estimated performance, as well as team changes at the firms. We recently launched emails internally for testing, and expect to beta launch this feature soon to any of our existing customers who would also like to receive alerts. Let us know if you would like to be included in our beta test – we’d be happy to include you if you can give us feedback along the way!

As we move towards a more unified and comprehensive search experience, we've moved filters and search functionality to a sidebar on the main Manager table, rather than having search as a separate page. On the manager table, the sidebar now enables users to filter for factors like confidence score, type of fund, position count, and market value.

View the Manager Search Here

These filters are just the beginning - we plan to continue to build out this search functionality with more data and filter options in the coming months.

At the manager level, we broke out the views to make it easier to see team movements at the firm level. We now have Former Employees, Hires, and Promotions are all separate tables.

Similarly, for a custom portfolio of managers under My Portfolios, we now show separate tables for Departures, Hires, and Promotions. This will make it easier to quickly identify meaningful team changes across a portfolio of managers.

• We recently updated the Manager Navigation views on the left side to provide easier access to the pages our users like to visit most often. For each manager, you will now find Allocator and Employee views closer to the top.
• On manager holdings pages, closed positions are now greyed out at the bottom, making them easier to identify:

Many of these improvements in August were a response to feedback from our users. Please keep sharing your ideas and pain points, and we will continue to incorporate them into our product roadmap!

July 2024

We continued enriching OWL’s universe of managers and allocator holdings. In July we increased the total number of managers in the OWL system to 10,500 across all asset classes. We also added 1,779 allocator holdings (e.g., manager investments), bringing the total to 34,000 allocator holdings with over 30,000 mappings to an OWL manager.

We’re excited to announce that employee cards now have a link to a one-click reference list, allowing users to quickly tee up references and avoid laborious LinkedIn searches:

Clicking this link will take you to a table that displays any shared work history between that person and nearly 1 million other individuals in OWL's people database:

Last month, we added shorts to the ‘Manager’ and ‘Security’ views in OWL. This month, we also added shorts to the ‘My Portfolios’ view. Users can now see disclosed short holdings across a custom portfolio of managers they track in OWL. OWL users can set up an unlimited number of custom portfolios in the platform in order to track aggregated returns and exposures across those groups:

We updated the ‘Allocators’ view under a manager’s profile to make it easier to see which specific vehicle allocators are invested in with that manager:

Tags for a manager’s fund type are now clickable. Clicking the tags for a manager’s fund type now redirects to a filtered list of all managers that share a similar tagging. We are actively working on rolling out additional tagging, which should further enhance the search process across the platform.

Once you create a custom search using manager tags, you can now add or remove tags for more specific filtering directly from the populated list of managers. We will continue adding more ways to search & filter for managers in the coming months.

We updated the formatting for the stock-level homepages to make them more user-friendly. The improvements include new download options, including plotted buys/sells by the selected managers, and a more mobile-friendly view:

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 incorporate them into our product roadmap!

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.