Trustable, official sources on holdings, purchases and sales by finance academics/professionals?
You won't be able to know the trading activity in a timely, actionable method in most cases. The exception is if the investor (individual, fund, holding company, non-profit foundation, etc) is a large shareholder of a specific company and therefore required to file their intentions to buy or sell with the SEC. The threshold for this is usually if they own 5% or greater of the outstanding shares. You can, however, get a sense of the holdings for some of the entities you mention with some sleuthing. Publicly-Traded Holding Companies Since you mention Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway is an example of this. Publicly traded companies (that are traded on a US-based exchange) have to file numerous reports with the SEC. Of these, you should review their Annual Report and monitor all filings on the SEC's website. Here's the link to the Berkshire Hathaway profile. Private Foundations Harvard and Yale have private, non-profit foundations. The first place to look would be at the Form 990 filings each is required to file with the IRS. Two sources for these filings are GuideStar.org and the FoundationCenter.org. Keep in mind that if the private foundation is a large enough shareholder in a specific company, they, too, will be required to file their intentions to buy or sell shares in that company. Private Individuals Unless the individual publicly releases their current holdings, the only insight you may get is what they say publicly or have to disclose — again, if they are a major shareholder.
"This falls under value investing, and value investing has only recently picked up study by academia, say, at the turn of the millennium; therefore, there isn't much rigorous on value investing in academia, but it has started. However, we can describe valuations: In short, valuations are randomly distributed in a log-Variance Gamma fashion with some reason & nonsense mixed in. You can check for yourself on finviz.  You can basically download the entire US market and then some, with many financial and technical characteristics all in one spreadsheet. Re Fisher: He was tied for the best monetary economist of the 20th century and created the best price index, but as for stocks, he said this famous quote 12 days before the 1929 crash: ""Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.""   - Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 17, 1929 EDIT Value investing has almost always been ignored by academia.  Irving Fisher and other proponents of it before it was codified by Graham in the mid 20th century certainly didn't help with comments like the above.  It was almost always believed that it was a sucker's game, ""the bigger sucker"" game to be more precise because value investors get destroyed during recession/collapses.  So even though a recessionless economy would allow value investors and everyone never to suffer spontaneous collapses, value investors are looked down upon by academia because of the inevitable yet nearly always transitory collapse.  This expresses that sentiment perfectly. It didn't help that Benjamin Graham didn't care about money so never reached the heights of Buffett who frequently alternates with Bill Gates as the richest person on the planet.  Buffett has given much credibility, and academia finally caught on around in 2000 or so after he was proven right about a pending tech collapse that nearly no one believed would happen; at least, that's where I begin seeing papers being published delving into value concepts.  If one looks harder, academia's even taken the torch and discovered some very useful tools. Yes, investment firms and fellow value investors kept up the information publishing, but they are not academics. The days of professors throwing darts at the stock listings and beating active managers despite most active managers losing to the market anyways really held back this side of academia until Buffett entered the fray and embarrassed them all with his club's performance, culminating in the Superinvestors article which is still relatively ignored.  Before that, it was the obsession with beta, the ratio of a security's variance to its covariance to the market, a now abandoned theory because it has been utterly discredited; the popularizers of beta have humorously embraced the P/B, not giving the satisfaction to Buffet by spurning the P/E.   Tiny technology firms receive ridiculous valuations because a long-surviving tiny tech firm usually doesn't stay small for long thus will grow at huge rates.  This is why any solvent and many insolvent tech firms receive large valuations: risk-adjusted, they should pay out huge on average.  Still, most fall by the wayside dead, and those 100 P/S valuations quickly crumble. Valuations are influenced by growth.  One can see this expressed more easily with a growing perpetuity: Where P is price, i is income, r is the rate of return, and g is the growth rate of i.  Rearranging, r looks like: Here, one can see that a higher P relative to i will dull the expected rate of return while a higher g will boost it. It's fun for us value investor/traders to say that the market is totally inefficient.  That's a stretch.  It's not perfectly inefficient, but it's efficient.  Valuations are clustered very tightly around the median, but there are mistakes that even us little guys can exploit and teach the smart money a lesson or two. If one were to look at a distribution of rs, one'd see that they're even more tightly packed.  So while it looks like P/Es are all over the place industry to industry, rs are much more well clustered. Tech, finance, and discretionaries frequently have higher growth rates so higher P/Es yet average rs.  Utilities and non-discretionaries have lower growth rates so lower P/Es yet average rs." "I am sorry to hear that.   Well, finance is a VERY large field encompassing decades upon decades of research, and thousands of pages of research. This question is usually a difficult one to answer simply because of the scope. My usual answer to people is to browse around this sub and the internet and learn from that, and then for specific questions to ask.   For your purposes, take a look at investopedia.com. While here it's an ""okay"" source, for a beginner I think it's a good place to start.  Is there any specific thing you have a question about now?  I know you mentioned the Big Short and some other things. Just keep in mind anything coming from Hollywood will be *extremely* biased." I spent a while looking for something similar a few weeks back and ended up getting frustrated and asking to borrow a friend's Bloombterg.   I wish you the best of luck finding something,  but I wasn't able to.   S&amp;P and Morningstar have some stuff on their site,  but I wasn't able to make use of it.  Edit: Also,  Bloomberg allows shared terminals.  Depending on how much you think as a firm,  these questions might come up,  it might be worth the 20k / year "Ok, I stand corrected. Still... those papers are quite away from my field of expertise and I don't want to lose a lot of time learning all the financial lingo. I asked an easy question: ""Is this [the everything bubble] a thing or not?"" It seems that it's not, but I still wanted to know more about it." "They aren't necessarily trustworthy. Many institutions claim to have a ""Chinese Wall"" between their investment banking arms and analysis arms. In practice, these walls have sometimes turned out to be entirely imaginary. That is, analysis is published with an eye to what is good for their investment banking business. One of the most notorious cases of this was Henry Blodget, an analyst with Merrill Lynch during the dot-com bubble. Blodget became a star analyst after he correctly predicted Amazon would hit $400/share within a year. However some of his later public analysis dramatically conflicted with his private comments. Famously when he started covering GoTo.com, rating it as ""neutral to buy"", he was asked  ""What's so interesting about Goto except banking fees????"" Blodget replied, ""nothin"". Eventually he was permanently banned from the securities industry." I had a question about this but it apparently wasn’t formed in the right way as I got no explanations and only downvotes, so let me try again.  Given the massive amount of info you gave, I tried to go through and find the data I was asking for- data behind the projections of such a loss.  Perhaps since I’m not a professional economist, It was not immediately apparent to me how to find the data behind the projections.   Would you mind demonstrating how any of these sources provide the data behind how such projections are made?  Or do you have any other advice as to how I could find an answer? No career advice or homework help (unless your homework is some kind of big project and you need an explanation on a concept).   I want to see financial news, legislation concerning the markets and regulation, self posts about financial concepts, opinion articles about finance from reputable sources, etc. "I work for an international real estate consulting firm in Shanghai. After graduation I worked in their Research Department for two years before switching to Commercial Brokerage 3 months ago.  Since my background was in Economics, I had to learn a lot about how the industry worked. I found this book to be very helpful:  ""Commercial Real Estate Analysis &amp; Investments"" by David Geltner.  I will admit that it's probably more than what you want to know, but it seriously gives an in depth breakdown of the entire industry.   About one year into starting, a major Real Estate iBank commissioned our company to due diligence on an office building acquisition in Shanghai. I was the only person capable of doing it as everyone else was either busy or couldn't speak English properly. With 1 year under my belt in Research and that book, I took the entire thing on. Had to walk into that meeting by myself with all the big wigs from New York, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai questioning every single number and assumption. I fucking nailed it. While credit towards understanding the market through work is deserved, a lot of the development of that report came from constantly consulting that book. It's worth every penny if your interested in commercial real estate investment.  That being said, if you want to track deals, the best place is called Real Estate Capital Analytics. Unfortunately you have to fork over a decent amount of cash to get access. For your situation I would recommend the following:  - ""The Urban Land Institute &amp; PwC Emerging Trends in Real Estate"": I believe you need to be a member but I can always find it online for free.  - Brokerage firms: I work in one and we cover residential, commercial and retail reports on cities throughout the world (I actually wrote the ones for China for two years). You can find a wealth of information in them. If you are seriously looking at buying with capital, call up the research department and ask if they have some time to discuss the market face to face; if you don't have capital, they won't talk to you. Fortunately however, most let you download their reports for free from their website so here's the list of the major ones in the US: CBRE, Colliers, CRESA, Cushman &amp; Wakefield, Jones Lang LaSalle, etc.  - The Loop - www.loopnet.com has a wealth of information from Commercial properties on the market to previous deals.  Please let me know if I can further advise." Start at Investopedia. Get basic clarification on all financial terms and in some cases in detail. But get a book. One recommendation would be Hull. It is a basic book, but quite informative. Likewise you can get loads of material targeted at programmers. Wilmott's Forum is a fine place to find coders as well as finance guys. To supplement Ben's answer: Following 'smart money' utilizes information available in a transparent marketplace to track the holdings of professionals.  One way may be to learn as much as possible about fund directors and monitor the firms holdings closely via prospectus. I believe certain exchanges provide transaction data by brokers, so it may be possible for a well-informed individual to monitor changes in a firms' holdings in between prospectus updates.  An example of a play on 'smart money':  S&P500 companies are reviewed for weighting and the list changes when companies are dropped or added. As you know there are ETFs and funds that reflect the holdings of the SP500.  Changes to the list trigger  'binary events' where funds open or close a position. Some people try to anticipate the movements of the SP500 before 'smart money' adjusts their positions. I have heard some people define smart money as people who get paid whether their decisions are right or wrong, which in my opinion, best captures the term. This Udemy course may be of interest: https://www.udemy.com/tools-for-trading-investing/ "Once upon a time I ran my own micro hedge fund for a very short time.  I can't recall the term commonly used in the industry for such info, but a few individuals, including the prime brokerage firm's founder, offered information of questionable character.  I refused to trade on any of it, not only because of the borderline illegality, but also because I didn't trust any of it... seemed to be more rumor mill type nonsense than anything else.  Moreover, if they already have that info, then it's already up/down... so it then goes the reverse direction as they take profits.  As is commonly said even in normal investor circles: ""buy the rumor, sell the news.""" as someone who made a fair attempt at understanding money subjects, I'd like some more writing from you.  I took high school level Marketing; Business economics; commercial law. it took six months on top of my previous High school ( with high level maths).  during those months I got medium grades, and failed  in- can you believe it - marketing. I had a go at The intelligent investor. I made it to page 96. But honestly I felt like I needed a lot of background in order for me to understand it. English is my second language. Sure I can understand  words like liability vs assets. but to this day i still can't remember the difference between a bull and bearish market. I know its about risk assesment on a national/ global level.  So who honestly gave finance a go but got their ass kicked. What would you say?  any books? I'll add Robert Shiller's [Irrational Exuberance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_Exuberance_(book) too, to summarize the recent era of Wall Street booms and busts.   The best books I've ever read on finance are [Nassim Taleb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb)'s. But they're mostly about his own analysis of financial phenomena, and they approach financial history mostly from that highly unique viewpoint. Good addition. When learning finance and business, /u/msattam, realize the world does not work cleanly like it does in a textbook. You have added complexity, both systemic and human caused. And that there is a very good reason that we must understand agency issues and how to mitigate those risks. Google Portfolio does the job: https://www.google.com/finance/portfolio You can add transaction data, view fundamentals and much more.