Fannie Mae (FNMA)

[kthomp19]

Websites that list institutional holdings cannot always be trusted. For example, according to this site, Bill Ackman owns no shares of FMCC. I am pretty sure this is incorrect. The site you linked to also shows Berkowitz selling all of his FNMAS shares on 2014-09-30. This is certainly incorrect.

Fairholme releases its own annual reports with a detailed breakdown of its holdings. Here is a link to the most recent one, showing holdings as of December 31, 2018.

Starting at the bottom of page 8, it shows Mortgage Finance having a 11.1% weight in the Fairholme Fund, 5.6% in the Income Fund, and 14.6% in the Allocation Fund. Pages 12, 18, and 25 show the share counts and series holdings of the respective funds. You will notice that only preferred shares are listed.

I do understand that Berkowitz is not obligated to disclose any holdings of FNMA or FMCC. However, if he did, the percentage allocations on pages 8 and 9 would be incorrect.

We are faced with three scenarios:

1) Berkowitz owns no commons, and the site you linked to is just wrong.
2) Berkowitz owns commons and is lying about the Mortgage Finance allocation percentages in his annual report.
3) Berkowitz owns commons, as well as exactly enough other unreported non-FnF holdings to keep all the allocation percentages correct.

#1 makes far, far more sense than #2, and both make far, far more sense than #3. I don't see any logic to support the idea that Berkowitz owns any commons. Just read the annual report.