> The rule in the US is roughly that if you are an institution — a pension fund, an endowment, an investment firm, a bank, etc. — and you own more than $100 million worth of stocks, you have to disclose your stock holdings every quarter. You file Form 13F with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and it is publicly available and everyone can see what stocks you own.

> If you don’t like this, there are reasonably standard solutions. The rule is actually that you have to file Form 13F if you “exercise investment discretion” over your stocks — meaning basically that you decide what stocks to buy and sell — so the trick is not to do that. If you have $1 billion to invest in the stock market, you go to a big institutional investment manager and say “hi, here’s $1 billion, please buy some stocks for me.” You agree on some investment criteria — the mandate for your investment — and you pay the manager some fees, and the manager buys the stocks for you. This saves you all sorts of aggravation — picking the stocks, doing the trading, setting up custody arrangements, etc. — but it also probably saves you from filing a Form 13F, if that’s your goal. Instead, the investment management firm files a Form 13F showing all of the stocks that it owns — that it “exercises investment discretion” over — for its various clients, including you. You are just an anonymous client; your data is aggregated with the rest of the clients.

> Presumably if you’re a big enough account, and interested enough in the markets, you might end up doing some kibbitzing about what your investment manager is buying. The manager’s mandate for your account might be narrow and customized for your interests; if you are, for instance, a fund that invests money for a religious group, you might tell the manager to avoid certain sorts of sin stocks. You might chat periodically with the manager about what they’re up to, and you might give them some input, without quite “exercising investment discretion” over the account. The manager makes the investing decisions, but with your preferences in mind.

> You could push this further. Hire an “investment manager” to buy and sell stocks for you, but just tell them exactly what to buy and sell. They’re not really in the business of making the investment decisions; they’re just in the business of sitting between you and the public Form 13F requirement. This way you get exactly the stocks you want, and presumably a fake investment manager is cheaper than a real one.

> This is illegal, though you can see how you might feel justified in doing it. “Why should random strangers get to know what stocks I own,” you might think. That seems to have been what the Mormon Church thought.

[..]

> “The Church was concerned that disclosure of the assets in the name of Ensign Peak, a known Church affiliate, would lead to negative consequences in light of the size of the Church’s portfolio,” says the complaint, and you can see their point. The effect of the 13F rules here is mostly to make public that the church has a lot of money. But the rules are the rules, and setting up 13 shell LLCs to pretend to manage your money for you doesn’t really work to get around them.