Bruce Berkowitz has held one stock for eighteen years
Some of the biggest current bets tracked here were opened years or decades ago. Holding period turns out to be another number that cannot be read on its own, the same lesson the site keeps landing on from a different angle each time.
Bruce Berkowitz opened his position in JOE in the first quarter of 2008, at an average price of 26.19 dollars. The most recent snapshot in this data puts the price at 69.58 dollars, a gain of 165.66 percent, and the position is still 81 percent of his entire disclosed portfolio. Eighteen years is roughly how long that is, start to most recent filing.
Carl Icahn's position in IEP has been open almost as long, since the second quarter of 2013, about 13 years. It has not gone the same way. The average buy price was 14.19 dollars, the most recent price is 8.06 dollars, a loss of 43.22 percent, and the position is still 46 percent of his disclosed book. Two of the longest-held large positions this data surfaces, one up 165.66 percent, one down 43.22 percent.
Three more of the largest currently disclosed bets sit between those two in age, and they do not sort neatly by duration either. Guy Spier's BRK-B position, opened in the fourth quarter of 2014, about 11.5 years ago, is up 223.52 percent and still 39.71 percent of his book. Clifford Sosin's CVNA position, opened in the first quarter of 2018, about 8 years ago, is up 563.89 percent, the largest gain of the five, and 83.37 percent of his portfolio, the largest weight of the five. Duan Yongping's AAPL position, opened in the third quarter of 2022, only about 3.75 years ago, is already up 77.25 percent and 50.55 percent of his book. The youngest position on this list is already a bigger gain than Icahn's 13-year-old one, and a smaller gain than Berkowitz's 18-year-old one. Age is not doing the sorting.
What the holding period does not tell you
A position held for 18 years looks, on its face, like the strongest possible statement of conviction a filing can make. Berkowitz's JOE case supports that reading. Icahn's IEP case, held nearly as long and currently underwater by more than 40 percent, does not. Neither position has been trimmed below the size that shows up in this data, both are still a large share of their manager's book, and the two outcomes are close to opposite. A long holding period says a manager has not sold. It does not say the position has been right.
What this data does not show
The initiation quarter and the average buy price are both real, disclosed figures, but they describe the position as it stands in the most recent filing, not a continuous record of every purchase and sale along the way. A manager who added to a position in year six, or trimmed it in year eleven, and ended up back near the original weight would look identical here to one who never touched it. Tenachine's guide on what a 13F filing does not show covers the same underlying limit from a different angle: a filing is a photograph of one date, not a video of everything that happened before it. Eighteen years of history compressed into one snapshot loses whatever happened in between, the same way one quarter's snapshot loses the six weeks before it.
Position weights here are also estimated from the latest available filing and current closing prices, and 13F filings only cover long US-listed equities, so an older position could sit alongside other holdings, or hedges, that this data has no way to show. Nothing about that gap makes the 18-year and 13-year figures wrong. It limits what those figures are entitled to claim on their own, the same limit Tenachine's guide on conviction buys reaches from position size rather than position age: a single number describing one dimension of a bet is not a verdict on the bet.