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Every quarter, institutional investors managing more than $100 million in U.S. equities have to file a document with the SEC called a 13F. It's basically a public receipt of every stock position they hold.
You've probably seen this play out with Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett buys something, the 13F drops 45 days later, and financial media runs a headline.
Personally, I like to review the 13F filings of Mag 7 companies to uncover unusual patterns or trends. In today’s tips email, I’ll walk you through what Alphabet ($GOOG) is holding and why it’s worth your attention.
Alphabet runs a multi-billion dollar public equity portfolio through three investment arms: Google LLC, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and CapitalG. And when you look at what they're buying, you start to see the company's strategic roadmap reflected in real dollars.
Their most recent filing, for Q1 2026, disclosed $4 billion in holdings across 27 positions. That's up from $2.6 billion just one quarter earlier.
The Top of the Portfolio Tells You a Story
Alphabet's largest position is CME Group ($CME), the company that operates the world's biggest derivatives exchange. Alphabet holds over $1 billion in CME, roughly 25% of the entire portfolio. That kind of concentration is intentional.
In 2021, Alphabet made a $1 billion investment in CME as part of a 10-year partnership to migrate CME's trading, data, and clearing infrastructure to Google Cloud. Think of it as a down payment on becoming the infrastructure layer underneath global financial markets.
Every futures contract, every options trade, every piece of market data flowing through CME could eventually run on Google Cloud. The equity stake and the cloud deal reinforce each other: Alphabet gets a massive enterprise customer locked in for a decade, and CME gets access to Google's AI and data capabilities. Both sides have skin in the game.
That's what makes this position so revealing. It tells you exactly where Alphabet wants Google Cloud to go next.
The Space Bets
The second and third largest positions are where it really hits for me as a sci-fi geek.
AST SpaceMobile ($ASTS) is building a satellite network designed to connect directly to unmodified smartphones, so your regular Android device can get signal from space with no special hardware required. Alphabet holds a significant stake and has been collaborating with AST SpaceMobile on product development and testing specifically for Android integration.
Planet Labs ($PL) operates a fleet of over 200 satellites that capture daily imagery of the entire Earth's surface. That geospatial data feeds into agriculture, defense, climate monitoring, and financial analysis.
Together, these two positions tell a clear story: connectivity and data collection from orbit. One company connects devices where cell towers can't reach. The other turns satellite imagery into structured data at global scale.
And if you're Alphabet, these fit right into what you've already built. Google Maps, Google Earth, and Android are already the dominant platforms for location, imagery, and mobile connectivity. AST SpaceMobile extends Android's reach to the parts of the world without cell coverage. Planet Labs generates a firehose of geospatial data that pairs naturally with Google's AI and cloud capabilities.
They're strategic adjacencies, each one expanding the surface area of Alphabet's existing products.
The Chip Position
Alphabet also holds a position in ARM Holdings ($ARM), the company that designs the chip architecture running in virtually every smartphone on the planet, and increasingly in data centers.
Google already builds custom chips internally. Their Tensor Processing Units power AI workloads across Google Cloud, and their Tensor chips run Pixel phones. ARM's architecture is the foundation that much of the semiconductor industry builds on top of, so holding a stake signals that Alphabet views efficient chip design as a long-term strategic priority alongside their own in-house efforts.
This makes even more sense when you consider the trajectory. As AI workloads scale and energy costs become a real constraint, the companies that control how efficiently chips run computation are going to matter a lot. Alphabet clearly sees that.
The Biotech Angle
One position that stands out from the rest is Revolution Medicines ($RVMD), a biotech company focused on precision oncology.
It makes more sense when you zoom out. Alphabet's DeepMind division spun out Isomorphic Labs, an AI drug discovery company that just raised $2.1 billion in May 2026 from GV, Thrive Capital, and Alphabet itself. Isomorphic builds on the same protein structure prediction capabilities behind AlphaFold.
The bet on Revolution Medicines sits alongside a much larger private investment thesis: AI will reshape how drugs are designed and developed. The 13F shows you the public equity piece, and the private side is where the bigger conviction lives.
What That Actually Teaches You
When a hedge fund buys a stock, they're making a financial bet. They believe the price will go up, and that's useful, but it's one-dimensional.
When Alphabet buys a stock, the more interesting question is: what are they trying to learn or build? The CME Group stake is about embedding Google Cloud into financial infrastructure. The AST SpaceMobile stake is about extending Android's addressable market to every square meter of the Earth's surface. These positions map directly to the company's own product roadmap.
So the question to think about is this: what does this position tell me about where they think their own industry is going?
You can run that question on any corporate 13F. And when the company doing the buying is one that literally shapes the technology landscape, the answers carry real weight.
A Few Things to Keep in Mind
These filings are 45 days stale. Alphabet's Q1 2026 filing covers positions as of March 31, but it dropped in mid-May. Prices have moved, and positions may have changed since then.
13Fs also only show long positions in U.S.-listed equities, so short positions, options, and private investments are all invisible. The Isomorphic Labs bet, GV's massive venture portfolio, and CapitalG's private equity holdings all live outside of this filing. You're seeing one layer of the iceberg.
And some positions are simply legacy holdings from older GV investments that went public, so they may reflect a past thesis rather than a current one. The concentrated positions, the new buys, and the ones that map cleanly to the parent company's product roadmap are the ones worth spending time on.
Where to Look
If you want to explore this yourself, you can search any company's 13F filings directly on the SEC's EDGAR database at sec.gov. Type in "Alphabet" (or any institutional filer), filter for 13F-HR filings, and you'll see every quarterly report going back years.
The data is free. The pattern recognition is where the real value lives.
Until next time 🫡 - Koh
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Disclaimer: Nothing in this newsletter constitutes investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Numbers and observations are as of publication. I may hold positions in companies discussed above. Always do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.