What did Money Mgrs Buy and Sell in 3Q

Here's a view of where all 13f filers (mutual funds, pensions funds, hedge funds, Warren Buffett et al) placed their bets in the third quarter. Filers have to tell the SEC what they owned in 2Q and 3Q; so we know the change in value for 3500 managers for 5000 stocks. We know the change in dollar value of a manager's holdings of GE; we also know if his number of GE shares increased or decreased. If the value of his GE holdings went up by 10% and his shares of GE went up by 5% we can deduce (roughly) that unrealized capital gains accounted for the other 5%. Aggregating that calculation for 100,000s of stock:manager pairs we get the chart above.

The chart tells us that in 3Q managers bought banks, brokers, builders and building materials stocks. The Bs of a recovery. They sold safer sectors like tobacco, food and insurance (not that safe). Some the most beaten down sectors enjoyed big cap gains in 3Q, but you already knew that. My takeaway is to keep an eye on the Bs as they will suffer in a double dip. The canary in the coal mine.