GetCoattail Research — Coinbase is the largest U.S. crypto exchange, and in October it sits eleventh on AltIndex's meme-stock list — after a week in which five analysts published price targets $131 apart, from $149 to $280, ahead of an October 29 earnings date. The filings describe a thinner register than the argument suggests: one tracked superinvestor holds the stock and added 7.34% in the June quarter, the full market's share count rose 24.00% while its filer count fell, its insiders have never recorded an open-market purchase against $954,009,508.69 of sales, and the borrow against the stock is up 82.7% in a year.
Start with the narrative. AltIndex's meme-stock list, updated on October 11, ranked Coinbase eleventh by Reddit mentions over the prior 24 hours, with 30 mentions and a bullish sentiment flag, at a displayed price of $179.39. The coverage behind the ranking is an argument about value, conducted in public: on October 7, Goldman Sachs raised its target to $244 from $219 and kept a Buy rating, while Barclays raised its target to $149 from $95 and kept an Underweight rating; Morgan Stanley raised its target to $258 from $250 on October 9, and Citizens JMP cut its target to $280 from $325 the same day while keeping a Market Outperform rating — still the highest of the set. The spread between the lowest and highest of those targets is $131. The broader consensus, as aggregated by MarketBeat and reported in October, reads Hold from 36 analysts — 20 Buy, 13 Hold and 3 Sell ratings — with an average target of $224.60. The company's next earnings release is scheduled for October 29. Our own price file, which ends October 2, puts the last close at $183.00 — down 19.1% year to date on that file, and 52.7% below the 252-session closing high of $387.27 set on October 8, 2025.
Now the filings. For Coinbase — the forty-first Filing Tape audit — the tape is a study in how few of the tracked registers are actually populated: a single famous-money holder who added while the price fell, a broad market that added shares through fewer filers, a 5% register with no activist filing at all, an insider record with zero purchases in it, a congressional record split evenly, and a borrow that has grown by more than four-fifths in a year.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — one holder, 462,016 shares, increased 7.34%
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 1 held Coinbase long — no option rows — totalling 462,016 shares worth $67,542,293. The direction count, on the collection's own labels, is one increased.
Samantha McLemore's Patient Capital Management holds all of it: 462,016 shares worth $67,542,293, a 2.21% portfolio weight, flagged increased — 100.0% of the tracked cohort's Coinbase shares, because it is the only holder. The cohort total moved from 430,405 shares at March 31 to 462,016 at June 30, a change of +7.34%, a difference of +31,611 shares, and that move is Patient Capital's own: its first-quarter row was 430,405 shares, and its increase of 7.3% on the collection's label matches the recalculation exactly. No manager appears in the collection's exit list for this name in the second quarter, and the two collections' second-quarter totals match to the share. The price fell from $174.61 at March 31 to $146.19 at June 30, a change of -16.3%, and the holder's reported value implies $146.19 per share, matching the June 30 close exactly. In other words, the one tracked manager in Coinbase spent the quarter in which its price fell by a sixth adding to the position — a register of one, moving one way.
Lens 2: institutions — 1,125 filers, down 54, shares up 24.00%
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the June quarter was a concentrating register. At June 30, 2026, 1,125 institutions reported positions, down 54 from 1,179 at March 31 (-4.58%), and 1,113 reported long positions. Reported shares rose 24.00%, from 116,689,185 to 144,697,310 shares — 28,008,125 more shares than the prior quarter, held across fewer filers. Reported aggregate value fell 3.19% to $32,329,764,569; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). That caution matters here: the implied value per share, $223.43, sits 52.8% above the June 30 close of $146.19, because the reported total sums every information-table row while the share count covers long common-stock rows only. Set the two 13F lenses side by side and they agree on shares and disagree on breadth: the tracked cohort added 7.34% and the full market added 24.00%, while the full market's filer count shrank by 54. The broad register spent the quarter concentrating — more shares, fewer names reporting them.
Lens 3: the 5% register — ten filings, all of them passive, none of them 13D
Our full parse holds ten SC 13D/G filings for Coinbase — three SC 13G originals and seven SC 13G/A amendments, and no SC 13D filing at all, sixteen reporting persons on a row basis, the most recent filed May 15, 2026. The register's maximum percentage belongs to an insider's own paper: Brian Armstrong printed 33,103,998 shares (13.91%) as of December 31, 2024, in a filing that also prints The Brian Armstrong Living Trust at 24,231,751 shares (10.58%) — two rows in one filing, reported here exactly as filed and never summed. The Vanguard Group printed 24,175,749 shares (11.43%) as of May 30, 2025, followed by an amendment printing 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026 — while Vanguard Capital Management, a separate reporting-person name, printed 16,327,137 shares (7.32%) as of March 31, 2026. We report the rows exactly as filed and never merge the two Vanguard names. BlackRock's latest row prints 14,618,089 shares (6.9%) as of June 30, 2025. The Jane Street group's parent row printed 14,007,775.23 shares (6.8%) as of December 31, 2024 — with four component rows printed at the identical count in the same filing — and then 5,223,839 shares (2.5%) as of March 31, 2025. The Susquehanna group rows, four names printed at identical counts, printed 11,118,835 shares (5.3%) as of March 31, 2025, and then 9,347,209 shares (4.2%) as of the same date in an amendment filed May 15, 2026 — the register's most recent filing. Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III's row prints 6,059,132 shares (2.87%) as of December 31, 2024. We report rows as filed and never sum them across the register either: the aggregation's total across these rows would add different dates together and present a history as if it were a register total. The structural fact of this lens is the empty half: ten filings, all passive 13G paper, and not one 13D — no filer in this register has declared an active intent.
Lens 4: insiders — zero purchases in the parsed record, $954,009,508.69 of sales
The parsed Form 4 record holds 192 filings through October 2, 2026. Across it, open-market purchases total zero transactions — none in the full record, none in the last year, and none in the last 90 days. Against that stand 582 sales totalling 3,246,761 shares and $954,009,508.69, by nine sellers, 432 of the 582 recorded as officer sales. The last year holds zero purchases against 276 sales of 1,409,740 shares for $346,781,927.44 by nine sellers, and the last 90 days hold 43 sales of 116,674 shares for $20,720,290.75 by four sellers, five of the 43 recorded as officer sales. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 11 over its 90-day window, records the same zero purchases but counts 29 sales totalling $19,129,364.39 — 14 transactions and $1,590,926.36 fewer than the full parse. We headline the full parse, print both figures in the methodology, and note that the two agree on the fact this lens is about: in the parsed record, no Coinbase insider has ever bought a share on the open market. We assign no motives to any of it; the record's shape is the fact — and the shape here is one-directional across the whole coverage, with an empty column on the other side.
Lens 5: Congress — one member, two purchases, two sales
Across the congressional record we maintain (combined record as of October 3, 2026), Coinbase shows one member, two purchase transactions and two sale transactions, with the most recent purchase dated July 17, 2026, and the member's party recorded as Democratic. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the same single member, the same two purchases, the same two sales and the same last-buy date; the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Coinbase row at all, so the combined record is entirely a House record. Congressional disclosures report value ranges rather than amounts, so this lens records direction and counts only; here it records a small, evenly split presence — the only lens in this audit where the tracked money both bought and sold.
Lens 6: short interest — 25,234,463 shares, up 82.7% in a year
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 130 settlements, from April 30, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 25,234,463 Coinbase shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 2.78, down 7.83% from the prior settlement. Against the fundamentals file's 263,782,000 shares outstanding, that is 9.57% of the share count. The direction over the year is what makes this reading stand out: the latest reading is up 82.7% from 13,811,151 shares on September 15, 2025. Against the June 30, 2026 settlement reading of 24,859,937 shares — the same date the 13F lenses snapshot — the latest reading is up just 1.5%, so the year's build was already in place by the quarter-end the 13F lenses describe. The series maximum is 43,891,979 shares at the January 13, 2023 settlement, so the latest reading sits 42.5% below that peak. The series minimum is 1,547,906 shares on May 14, 2021, and the first settlement in the series, on April 30, 2021, printed 1,981,208 shares.
The recent settlements run 25,046,921 on July 15, then 21,790,827, 22,918,131, 27,378,540 and 25,234,463 — a borrow holding near its year's high level rather than unwinding into the autumn. Set beside the price file, the geometry is the year's story in one line: the stock closed at $183.00 on October 2, down 19.1% year to date, while the borrow against it has grown by more than four-fifths over the same year.
The gap, stated plainly
The registers describe a stock the analyst community spent a week arguing about in a $131-wide band — targets from $149 to $280, a Hold consensus at $224.60, an October 29 earnings date ahead — months after its institutions had already moved, in narrower ways than the argument suggests. The tracked superinvestors held 462,016 shares at June 30 — one holder, Patient Capital Management, at 100.0% of it — having added 7.34% in a quarter when the price fell 16.3%. The full market moved the same way on shares and the other way on breadth: 1,125 filers, down 54, holding 144,697,310 reported shares, up 28,008,125. The 5% register printed ten filings, every one of them passive: a Vanguard Group row that went to zero under that name while a Vanguard Capital Management row printed 7.32%, a Jane Street parent row down from 6.8% to 2.5%, and not one 13D. Insiders, across 192 parsed filings, have recorded zero open-market purchases against $954,009,508.69 of sales by nine sellers, with $346,781,927.44 of that selling inside the last year. Congress registers one member who bought twice and sold twice. And the borrow, at 25,234,463 shares, stands 82.7% above where it stood a year ago. One plausible reading is that the registers run on different clocks and different mandates: a single tracked fund added into a falling quarter, the broad market concentrated into fewer filers holding more shares, no activist has filed on the name, its own insiders have never bought across the whole parsed record, and short sellers spent the year building a borrow the price decline alone does not explain. The record supports each clause separately; it does not say which register is right.
What would change the picture
Nothing above is a recommendation. It is a record. These are the filings that would change the description:
- 1. The 2026Q3 13Fs (filing window closing mid-November 2026). The tracked cohort held 462,016 shares at June 30 across one holder, after a 7.34% increase. Whether Patient Capital Management's position grows again, holds or disappears — and whether a second tracked name joins it — is the whole lens.
- 2. A first insider purchase. The parsed record holds zero purchase transactions across 192 filings, against $954,009,508.69 of sales. Any open-market purchase print — above all an officer purchase — would break the record's shape; continued silence would extend it.
- 3. A first 13D filing. The 5% register holds ten filings, all passive 13G paper, headed by Brian Armstrong's 33,103,998-share row (13.91%). A first 13D — any filer declaring active intent — would change this lens from a register of index, founder and market-maker positions into something else.
- 4. Whether the borrow keeps building. Short interest stands at 25,234,463 shares, up 82.7% in a year and 42.5% below its January 2023 maximum of 43,891,979. A return toward that maximum would extend the build; a fall back toward the September 2025 reading of 13,811,151 would unwind it.
- 5. Whether Congress adds a second member. The congressional register holds one member, two purchases and two sales. A second member's first print, in either chamber, would widen this lens beyond a single name.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by one of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 462,016 shares, all of it one holder, increased 7.34% in a quarter the price fell 16.3% — whose full market added 28,008,125 reported shares across 54 fewer filers in the same quarter, whose 5% register is entirely passive paper headed by a founder's 13.91% row, whose insiders have bought zero shares across the parsed record against $954,009,508.69 of sales, whose congressional register is a single member split evenly between buying and selling, and whose borrow has grown 82.7% in a year.
Related reading: Two of 83: The Superinvestors Cut SanDisk 99.7% — to 768 Shares — in the Quarter It Rose 257.9% — Filing Tape #40; Seven of 83: One Holder Is 82.6% of the Superinvestors' McDonald's Stake. The Cohort Cut 24.8% in Q2. — Filing Tape #39; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. Coinbase's own page: Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN) on GetCoattail.
Methodology and data notes
- Superinvestor lens: 83 managers collected directly from SEC EDGAR Form 13F (managers_13f collection), positions as of June 30, 2026; Coinbase identified by CUSIP 19260Q107. One distinct manager holds a long position totalling 462,016 shares; the reported row is long (no put or call rows); the direction on the collection's label is one increased, and the collection's exit list contains no row for this CUSIP. Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (430,405 shares at March 31 across one filing row — Samantha McLemore - Patient Capital Management 430,405 on the pipeline's CUSIP basis; 462,016 shares at June 30 across one filing row; change +7.34%) are from the site pipeline's holdings files on the same CUSIP basis in both quarters, and the pipeline's second-quarter total matches the EDGAR collection's long total exactly (difference of 0 shares and $0). Patient Capital Management's collection label (increased 7.3%) matches the pipeline recalculation (462,016 / 430,405 − 1). Patient Capital Management's share of the cohort is 100.0% = 462,016 / 462,016.
- Full-market lens: SEC Form 13F Data Sets full-market aggregation. The primary table is the full13f collection's by-ticker file (holders = distinct filers reporting the CUSIP; 1,113 of the 1,125 reported long positions), and its figures match the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for 19260Q107 exactly on holders, shares, reported value, prior holders and prior reported value. The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (971 and 1,025, a net of -54 that matches the change in holder count) have no counterpart in the by-CUSIP aggregation, which does not publish them, so this audit does not rely on them. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($32,329,764,569 over 144,697,310 shares) implies ≈$223.43 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $146.19 in our price file, a gap of +52.8%. The aggregate sums the VALUE of every information-table row — including put and call option rows — while the share count covers long common-stock rows only, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollar values "reported."
- Insider lens: full-parse Form 4 aggregation (agg_by_ticker), record as of October 2, 2026 (192 filings). Sale and purchase counts are transaction-code counts (S and P) in non-derivative rows; grants and exercises are not counted as purchases, and one filing can contain many transaction rows. Purchase transactions total 0 across the parsed record — in the full record, in the year through October 2, 2026, and in the 90 days through October 2, 2026 alike. Sale transactions total 582 across the record (3,246,761 shares, $954,009,508.69, nine sellers, 432 of the 582 recorded as officer sales), 276 in the year through October 2, 2026 (1,409,740 shares, $346,781,927.44, nine sellers), and 43 in the 90 days through October 2, 2026 (116,674 shares, $20,720,290.75, four sellers, five of the 43 recorded as officer sales). The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 11, 2026, 90-day window) records zero purchases, 29 sales and $19,129,364.39 of sale value — 14 transactions and $1,590,926.36 fewer than the full parse's 90-day window; the two agree on zero purchases, and both figures are printed here rather than blended. "Purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 192 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G aggregation and parsed filings (10 filings matching CUSIP 19260Q107 and issuer CIK 1679788, sixteen reporting persons on a row basis: 3 SC 13G originals and 7 SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through May 15, 2026. Brian Armstrong's filing's rows (33,103,998 shares at 13.91% as of December 31, 2024, filed February 14, 2025, printed jointly in the same filing with The Brian Armstrong Living Trust at 24,231,751 shares at 10.58%), The Vanguard Group's rows (24,175,749 shares at 11.43% as of May 30, 2025, filed June 5, 2025; 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 26, 2026), Vanguard Capital Management's row (16,327,137 shares at 7.32% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 29, 2026), BlackRock, Inc.'s row (14,618,089 shares at 6.9% as of June 30, 2025, filed July 16, 2025), the Jane Street filing's rows (JANE STREET GROUP, LLC 14,007,775.23 shares at 6.8% as of December 31, 2024, with four component rows at the identical count in the same filing; 5,223,839 shares at 2.5% as of March 31, 2025, filed May 13, 2025), the Susquehanna group rows (four reporting-person names at 11,118,835 shares at 5.3% as of March 31, 2025, filed May 15, 2025; and at 9,347,209 shares at 4.2% as of the same date in an amendment filed May 15, 2026) and Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III's row (6,059,132 shares at 2.87% as of December 31, 2024, filed January 17, 2025) are reported as filed, under the reporting-person names exactly as they appear. No rows are summed, because the aggregation's totalSharesReported field (280,866,586.15 shares) adds different dates together. No reason for any change is asserted — the filings themselves are the record.
- Congress lens: Senate PTR archive and House PTR archive as maintained on this site, combined record as of October 3, 2026 — one member, two purchase transactions, two sale transactions, most recent purchase July 17, 2026, party Democratic. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the same member, purchases, sales and date; the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Coinbase row at all. Congressional disclosures report value ranges, so this lens records direction and counts only.
- Short interest lens: FINRA Equity Short Interest files (biweekly settlement dates), collected directly from FINRA's public distribution. The published series covers 130 settlements from April 30, 2021 (1,981,208 shares) to September 15, 2026. The maximum of the series is 43,891,979 shares on January 13, 2023, so the latest reading of 25,234,463 shares on September 15, 2026 sits 42.5% below the peak ((25,234,463 / 43,891,979) − 1), 1.5% above the June 30, 2026 settlement reading of 24,859,937, and 82.7% above the September 15, 2025 reading of 13,811,151; the change from the prior settlement is -7.83%. The latest row's prior-settlement field (27,378,540) matches the prior settlement file's reported figure exactly. The series minimum is 1,547,906 shares on May 14, 2021. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact. The share-count ratio (9.57%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries Coinbase's revenue of $7,181,325,000 labelled fiscal 2025, its net income of $1,260,327,000 labelled fiscal 2025, and its assets of $29,671,832,000 labelled fiscal 2025 — all three fields carry the same fiscal year in the file. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 263,782,000 (as of June 30, 2026, sourced in the file to a us-gaap CommonStockSharesOutstanding count) and a file-computed market value of $48,994,870,128.9978. The file's price for the name is $185.74 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $183.00, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for Coinbase through October 2, 2026 ($183.00 close, -19.1% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $387.27 on October 8, 2025; 252-session closing low $141.09 on February 12, 2026; closes of $174.61 at March 31, 2026 and $146.19 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of -16.3%; change from June 30 to October 2 of +25.2% ((183.00 / 146.19) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -52.7%, and the series in our price file begins June 1, 2021 at $238.93.
- Market context sources: AltIndex's meme-stock list as updated on October 11, 2026 (Coinbase eleventh by Reddit mentions over the prior 24 hours, 30 mentions, bullish sentiment flag, displayed price $179.39), checked October 11, 2026; the run of analyst targets reported across financial outlets on October 7–9, 2026 (Goldman Sachs raised to $244 from $219 with a Buy rating on October 7; Barclays raised to $149 from $95 with an Underweight rating on October 7; Morgan Stanley raised to $258 from $250 on October 9; Citizens JMP cut to $280 from $325 with a Market Outperform rating on October 9) and the analyst backdrop aggregated by MarketBeat (Hold consensus, average price target of $224.60, 36 analysts: 20 Buy, 13 Hold, 3 Sell) as reported in October 2026; and the company's next earnings release scheduled for October 29, 2026, as reported by MarketBeat and FXEmpire. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- Coinbase is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Coinbase Global, Inc. (COIN) stock page. Series data: coin_lens_data.csv · coin_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: SanDisk · McDonald's · IREN.
Past patterns are not a promise of future results. For education only — not investment advice.
This article describes public filings as of the dates stated. It is not investment advice and makes no recommendation. Filings lag reality: 13F positions are as of June 30, 2026, and later trading is not yet public.
Revision history
- v1.0 — October 11, 2026: first publication.