The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Web site, SEC.gov, should be bookmarked by every serious investor. The site is full of wonderful information. Today, I’ll take a look at one of my favorite SEC filings—form 13F.

The SEC requires all institutional investment managers who have investment capital of $100 million or more in Section 13(F) securities to file Form 13F. This move, authorized in the 1970s, was done to help provide transparency.

Okay, let’s cut to the chase. If you go to the SEC’s Web site and view Form 13F for a company, you’ll be looking at their stock holdings—as of the report cutoff date.

Using SEC Form 13F

Let’s say you’re curious about the holdings of a top hedge fund manager. We’ll use Eddie Lampert of ESL Investments for our example.

You click over to the SEC’s Web site, type in ESL Investments, and view their latest Form 13F filing. I actually did this tonight.

Here’s the link to their May 15, 2007 SEC Form 13F filing if you wish to follow along.

Upon viewing their May 15, 2007 Form 13F, we can see that it’s simply a notice and not a holdings report.

Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see that RBS Partners, L.P. will report the holdings. So, let’s pull up their latest Form 13F. [ LINK ].

We can see that they have a few positions—Autozone, AutoNation, Citigroup, Clear Channel Communications, Motorola, and Sears. We can also see the size of those positions.

If you visit the SEC Web site, you’ll see that RBS Partners, L.P. also filed a few Form 13F amendments to update positions.

Recent SEC Form 13F Filings

You can also browse recent filings by going directly to this URL:

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent

On top of the page will be a box with a field called “Form Type” as seen below. Enter “13″ in the box and click on the “Retrieve Filings” button to browse the latest Form 13F filings.

While writing this article for you, I noticed that ExxonMobil Investment Management Inc filed their Form 13F today. Being curious I viewed the 13F, and here are some of their holdings.

• 407,705 shares of ConocoPhillips (Symbol: COP)
• 536,113 shares of Chevron (Symbol: CVX)
• 1,405,234 shares of Exxon Mobil Corp (Symbol: XOM)
• 293,996 shares of Schlumberger LTD (Symbol: SLB)
• 228,013 shares of Halliburton Co (Symbol: HAL)

Needless to say, they own shares of many companies—even 54,402 shares of Google (Symbol: Goog).

Remember, the SEC Form 13F isn’t that timely, but it’s a good way to get some insight. And it makes for entertaining research and reading.