Every three months, I go through an exercise that apparently strikes a large portion of the investing public as hopelessly old fashioned.

I look at what successful investors are actually buying.

I know. Crazy stuff.

There are no flashing red and green lights. Nobody is promising a 90% winning percentage. There is no secret indicator discovered by a gentleman operating a YouTube channel from his spare bedroom. Nobody is promising that a 37 cent artificial intelligence penny stock is about to become the next NVIDIA.

Instead, I spend time digging through 13F filings.

Every quarter, I point out successful money managers who are operating far away from the Wall Street spotlight and piling up profits for their investors. These are often investors with decades of experience, disciplined processes, and actual records of compounding capital.

Most investors will ignore them.

They are too busy looking for the next penny stock miracle, the newest trading system with a 90% win rate and average gains of 200%, or whatever flavor of financial hopium is dominating social media this week.

That is fine.

It leaves more opportunities for the rest of us.

Form 13F: The Best Free Research Department in the World

Form 13F is one of the greatest gifts ever handed to individual investors. Institutional investment managers exercising discretion over at least $100 million of qualifying securities generally have to disclose their holdings to the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter. The filings are due within 45 days after quarter end and disclose securities held, share counts, and market values.

In other words, the federal government has created what amounts to the largest free investment research department in the world.

You can see what some of the smartest investors on the planet own.

You can compare their holdings from one quarter to the next.

You can identify stocks they are accumulating aggressively.

You can see where several successful investors are reaching similar conclusions independently.

All it costs is a little time and effort.

Naturally, many people would rather pay $4,997 for a trading course.

There are limitations to 13Fs. The information is backward looking. A manager may have bought a stock early in the quarter and sold it before you ever see the filing. Certain securities and short positions are not disclosed, so you are not seeing an investor’s complete portfolio or risk exposure. A 13F should never be treated as an instruction to blindly copy somebody else’s portfolio.

That misses the point.

A 13F is a shopping list.

It tells us where highly experienced investors have already spent enormous amounts of time and money doing research. When someone with a long record and a disciplined process starts building a meaningful position in an unpopular company, I want to know why.

Then I can do my own work.

That is where the edge lies.

The goal is not to become David Tepper, Warren Buffett, Seth Klarman, or any other manager whose filings we follow. The goal is to use their research efforts to narrow several thousand publicly traded companies down to a manageable collection of potentially interesting situations.

Kopernik Global Investors

One of my favorite sources for exactly this type of idea generation is Kopernik Global Investors.

Kopernik is not one of those investment firms whose portfolio could easily be confused with the S&P 500. If you want Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, and a few other stocks everybody on CNBC already knows they are supposed to love, there are easier places to look.

Kopernik likes to go wandering around in the less crowded sections of the investment universe.

That immediately gets my attention.

Kopernik Global Investors was founded in Tampa in July 2013 by David Iben. As of June 30, 2026, the employee-owned firm reported about $9.7 billion of assets under management, 49 employees, and a global equity operation built around bottom-up fundamental analysis.

The name tells you quite a bit about the culture.

Kopernik takes its name from Mikołaj Kopernik, better known to most of us as Nicolaus Copernicus, who had the inconvenient habit of trusting evidence even when his conclusions disagreed dramatically with conventional wisdom. The investment firm explicitly identifies independent thinking as one of its organizing principles.

There are worse role models for an investor.

Kopernik describes itself as a global value investor that approaches stocks as ownership interests in businesses. Its analysts conduct bottom-up work on individual companies, competitive positions, industry supply and demand, and management before developing estimates of appraisal value. The firm believes market inefficiencies create opportunities to buy businesses trading substantially below intrinsic value.

That language sounds familiar because it should.

Price matters.

Value matters.

Independent thought matters.

Being willing to look stupid for a while matters enormously.

Kopernik’s people explicitly say they are willing to be early, unpopular, and out of favor when their analysis supports doing so. They also emphasize what they call a behavioral edge, the willingness to act on research even when markets and prevailing opinion disagree.

That is a pretty good description of successful value investing.

David Iben brings a substantial résumé to the exercise.

Before founding Kopernik, he headed the global value team at Vinik Asset Management and managed a $2.7 billion global value long-short portfolio. Before that, Iben was co-founder, chief investment officer, co-president, and lead portfolio manager at Tradewinds Global Investors. Tradewinds had grown to approximately $38 billion by February 2012. Earlier in his career, Iben spent 14 years at Farmers Group, eventually becoming acting chief investment officer with responsibility for approximately $16 billion.

He is joined today by Co-Chief Investment Officer and Director of Research Alissa Corcoran, along with portfolio managers and analysts including Isabel Satra, Todd Tosti, Lee Quaintance, and a broader research organization.

This is not a couple of guys who discovered stock charts during the pandemic.

What the Filing Shows

The firm’s second-quarter 2026 13F is particularly interesting.

At June 30, Kopernik reported approximately $1.63 billion in 13F securities. The portfolio was remarkably concentrated by modern institutional standards, with roughly 76% of reported assets in its 10 largest holdings. Materials represented roughly 36% of the reported portfolio, followed by energy at approximately 25%, communications at 12%, and real estate at almost 10%.

That tells you something immediately.

Kopernik is not benchmarking its way to mediocrity.

During the second quarter, the firm added to 17 existing holdings and established two new positions according to an analysis of the filing. Range Resources was its largest addition, with an estimated $96.9 million of additional capital committed. KT was another major addition at roughly $74.2 million, while Weyerhaeuser represented approximately $45 million of additional buying.

Several stocks in the filing deserve immediate inclusion on our research shopping list.

5 Stocks Kopernik Is Buying

Range Resources

Range Resources (NYSE:RRC) is one of the most interesting.

Range is a leading independent U.S. natural gas and natural gas liquids producer concentrated in the Appalachian Basin. More important from a historical perspective, Range was one of the pioneers of the Marcellus Shale, helping demonstrate the enormous economic potential of one of the world’s most important natural gas formations.

Natural gas has never lacked volatility, which is precisely why investors frequently get opportunities to buy good assets when sentiment toward the commodity turns miserable.

Kopernik appears quite comfortable with that.

At the end of June, Range was the firm’s largest reported holding, with approximately 6.58 million shares valued at about $244.6 million. The position represented almost 15% of Kopernik’s reported 13F portfolio.

A 15% position is not somebody kicking the tires.

That is conviction.

KT Corporation

KT Corporation (NYSE:KT) is another unusual holding, particularly for U.S. investors who rarely venture beyond familiar domestic names.

KT is one of South Korea’s major telecommunications companies and traces its history through the development of the Korean communications system. Its businesses span wireless and fixed-line telecommunications, broadband, digital services, and increasingly technology-related platforms. The company describes itself as Korea’s national telecommunications provider while pushing further into artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure.

Telecom stocks are rarely going to excite the unicorn hunters.

That may be part of the attraction.

Telecommunications infrastructure generates recurring demand, substantial cash flows, and hard-to-replicate networks. When those assets become inexpensive because investors would rather chase whatever technology story is currently selling at 17 times revenues, value investors tend to become interested.

Kopernik owned about 9 million KT ADRs at June 30 worth approximately $156.3 million, making the company almost 10% of the reported portfolio. The firm’s second-quarter additions to KT were estimated at approximately $74 million.

Weyerhaeuser

Then we have Weyerhaeuser (NYSE:WY).

If you have followed my work for any length of time, you already know why timber gets my attention.

Trees are one of my favorite assets because they possess a characteristic almost no other commodity enjoys.

If today’s price stinks, you can generally leave them in the ground and let them keep growing.

Weyerhaeuser has been in the timber business for more than 125 years. Today it is one of the world’s largest timber, land, and forest products companies. The company manages vast timber holdings while producing lumber and other wood products used primarily in residential and commercial construction. It also owns land with potential value from development, conservation, recreation, and renewable energy applications.

This is a real asset business with enormous underlying acreage, exposure to housing and construction, and a biological asset that literally grows while you own it.

Kopernik owned approximately 3.76 million Weyerhaeuser shares worth almost $90 million at quarter end. An analysis of the quarter’s activity estimates Kopernik added roughly $45 million to the position during the second quarter.

Rayonier

Rayonier (NYSE:RYN) takes the timber idea in a slightly different direction.

Rayonier is a land resources real estate investment trust with more than 4 million acres across the United States. Its operations include timberland management, wood products manufacturing, real estate development and sales, and other land-based opportunities. Following its combination with PotlatchDeltic, Rayonier also operates sawmills and a plywood facility.

Timber REITs can be frustrating investments when lumber prices are weak or housing markets are sluggish.

That frustration is often exactly what creates the opportunity.

Wall Street tends to value businesses based primarily on what earnings might be next quarter. Timber investors can look at what the underlying acreage might be worth over decades.

Kopernik already owned more than 2.18 million Rayonier shares at the end of the first quarter. By June 30, its position had risen to approximately 3.27 million shares worth roughly $69.6 million, or more than 4% of the reported portfolio.

That is the kind of accumulation I want to investigate.

Mosaic

Finally, there is Mosaic (NYSE:MOS).

Mosaic is one of the world’s largest producers of phosphate and potash fertilizer, two nutrients essential to global crop production. It operates across the crop nutrient supply chain and sells products to farmers around the world.

Fertilizer might be even less fashionable than timber.

Excellent.

Agricultural nutrients are not optional over long periods of time. The world can postpone buying a new smartphone. It cannot permanently stop growing food.

Mosaic’s earnings can move dramatically with fertilizer prices, agricultural economics, input costs, and global supply conditions. That cyclicality makes the stock periodically uncomfortable enough to become interesting to investors who are willing to look through temporary problems.

There were plenty of temporary problems in the most recent quarter. Mosaic reported a second-quarter 2026 net loss of $273 million as weaker volumes and other pressures weighed on results.

That sounds terrible.

Value investors have been known to show up precisely when things sound terrible.

Kopernik established a new Mosaic position during the second quarter. By June 30, the firm owned about 1.12 million shares valued at approximately $23.7 million.

The Real Lesson

I am not suggesting that everybody rush out Monday morning and buy KT, Range Resources, Weyerhaeuser, Rayonier, and Mosaic.

That would be exactly the wrong lesson.

The lesson is that an investment organization with almost $10 billion under management, a research team filled with experienced professionals, and an investment process built around valuation and independent thought has decided these companies are worth serious attention.

That earns them a place on our research list.

Maybe our work will agree with Kopernik.

Maybe it will not.

The beautiful thing is that somebody else has already done an enormous amount of screening for us.

This is why I keep coming back to 13F filings every quarter.

Investors spend fortunes buying research, newsletters, software systems, quantitative screens, and trading programs designed to give them an informational advantage.

Meanwhile, some of the best investors in the world are required by law to periodically tell us what they own.

For free.

Yet an astonishing percentage of investors pay no attention.

They are searching for the next cryptocurrency that will rise 10,000%, the penny stock that is supposedly about to revolutionize artificial intelligence, or the trading algorithm discovered by an anonymous gentleman whose Lamborghini seems to spend an unusual amount of time parked in front of rented houses.

Good luck with that.

I will keep reading the filings.

There is no guarantee that following great investors will produce great investments. Successful money managers make mistakes. They buy too early. They occasionally misunderstand businesses. Their time horizons may be dramatically different from ours.

That is why we do our own research.

However, successful investing is largely about increasing the odds in our favor.

Starting our research with companies being accumulated by experienced investors with successful long-term records seems like a substantially better use of time than starting with a list of stocks being promoted by strangers on social media.

The 13F database is essentially a giant, continuously updated research department staffed by thousands of professional investors.

We get to use it for free.

Patient, aggressive investors should take full advantage.

The unicorn hunters and hopium smokers are welcome to ignore it.

Somebody has to be on the other side of our trades.