GetCoattail Research — The Filing Tape #77. Johnson & Johnson sits in MarketBeat's top-five trending list the day after its third-quarter report, and the filings describe a twelve-name tracked cohort that cut its stake 12.33% in the second quarter, a full market that added 247.7 million shares, an insider record with exactly one open-market purchase, and a borrow at a quarter of its 2023 peak.
The Hype
Johnson & Johnson is trending the day after earnings. It appears in MarketBeat's top-five trending-stocks list alongside Tesla, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, and the reason is the calendar: the company reported third-quarter results on October 13. By the company's own release, sales were $25,399 million, up 5.9% year over year, and adjusted earnings per share were $2.59, above the $2.53 consensus carried in earnings coverage; reported earnings per share were $0.09 after special charges, and the company raised its full-year 2026 guidance. The market's immediate answer was negative: MarketBeat's earnings page records a $248.90 close on October 13, down 5.6% on the day. Our own daily-close file ends earlier, on October 2, at $256.03 — up 23.7% year to date on that file, and 8.0% below the $278.43 closing high of September 3. The filings answer who held the stock before any of this, and what has been filed since.
The Tape
For Johnson & Johnson — the seventy-seventh Filing Tape audit — the tape shows a twelve-name tracked cohort whose share count fell 12.33% in the second quarter even as the full market added 247,678,461 shares, an insider record containing exactly one open-market purchase against 36 sales, a congressional record of one purchase and five sales from a single member, a 5% register that is one passive holder's filing chain peaking at 10.1%, and a borrow down 75.2% from its series maximum.
| Lens | As of | What the filings show | Direction vs prior period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Superinvestors (13F) | Jun 30, 2026 | 12 long holders; 2,641,637 shares; $670,895,796 | Rows 12 → 12; shares −12.33% as five holders cut |
| All institutions (13F) | Jun 30, 2026 | 4,687 filers; 1,774,772,948 shares | Filers +101; shares +16.22% |
| Insiders (Form 4) | Oct 2, 2026 | 1 purchase in the full parsed record; last 90 days: 10 sales | The single purchase is more than a year old in the record's windows |
| Congress | Oct 3, 2026 | 1 member, 1 purchase, 5 sales (House + Senate) | Most recent purchase dated Jun 9, 2026 |
| 13D/G | May 1, 2026 | 3 parsed filings (all SC 13G-family); register maximum 10.1% (Vanguard) | Latest filing reports 7.49% under a successor reporting name |
| Short interest (FINRA) | Sep 15, 2026 | 21,188,522 shares; 0.88% of shares outstanding | Down 3.9% year over year; 75.2% below the series maximum |
Lens 1 — the superinvestors: twelve holders, and the top one is nearly half. We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 12 held Johnson & Johnson long, totalling 2,641,637 shares worth $670,895,796, with no option rows. Yacktman Asset Management holds 1,259,977 shares worth $319,996,359 — 47.7% of the cohort's position — at a 3.96% weight, and it is the cohort's only increaser, up 0.8%. Behind it sit Markel Group (610,800 shares, unchanged), Mairs & Power Funds (423,010 shares, decreased 26.8%), Tweedy Browne (201,644 shares, decreased 8.1%) and Fairfax Financial (73,400 shares, unchanged), then seven smaller holders. Five of the twelve decreased, five were unchanged, one increased and one — Semper Augustus, at 794 shares — is new. One tracked manager exited: Pzena Investment Management, which had held 203,965 shares. On the pipeline's holdings files, the cohort held 3,012,988 shares in 12 rows at March 31 and 2,641,637 at June 30 — down 371,351 shares (−12.33%), with the row count unchanged because one exit and one entry offset. The implied price, $253.97, sits exactly on the June 30 close. 13F figures are as of June 30, 2026; funds have up to 45 days to file, so this picture is complete — and always lagging.
Lens 2 — institutions: 101 more filers, 247.7 million more shares. At June 30, 2026, 4,687 institutions reported positions, up 101 from 4,586 at March 31 (+2.20%), 4,672 of them long. Reported shares rose 16.22%, from 1,527,094,487 to 1,774,772,948 shares. Reported value rose 21.73% to $445,603,071,206; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The full market added shares at a pace the tracked cohort did not join — the cohort's entire position is 2,641,637 shares, and it shrank.
Lens 3 — insiders: one purchase in the entire parsed record. The parsed Form 4 record holds 122 filings through October 2, 2026, and exactly one purchase transaction — 1,250 shares for $257,687.50, by one buyer, with no officer purchases in any window. That purchase sits outside the last 90 days: the 90-day window holds zero purchases and 10 sale transactions totalling 259,340 shares and $67,779,422.92, by 5 sellers, all 10 of them officer sales. Across the last year the record holds the same single purchase against 29 sales totalling 630,943 shares and $154,853,054.97, by 10 sellers; across the full record, 36 sales totalling 869,612 shares and $196,774,793.58, every one an officer sale. The site's own insider aggregate, compiled over the same 90-day window, matches the full parse exactly. We assign no motives; the record contains one purchase to describe, and this audit describes it.
Lens 4 — Congress: one member, one purchase, five sales. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026) carries one member with one purchase transaction and five sale transactions, the most recent purchase dated June 9, 2026, with the member's party recorded as D. The House aggregate carries the purchase and four of the sales; the Senate aggregate carries the fifth sale and no purchase. Six transactions from one member is a print, not a pattern, and this audit reports it as exactly that.
Lens 5 — the 5% register: three filings, all passive, one name chain. Our full parse holds exactly 3 SC 13D/G filings — one SC 13G and two SC 13G/A amendments, with no SC 13D-family filing at all — 3 reporting-person rows across 2 names, most recently filed May 1, 2026, matching the site aggregate's ticker-keyed row on every headline field. The register's maximum is The Vanguard Group reporting 243,455,135 shares (10.1%) as of January 30, 2026. The chain then changes reporting entity as filed: The Vanguard Group reports 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026, and Vanguard Capital Management reports 180,631,228 shares (7.49%) as of March 31, 2026. There is no activist filer in this register at all.
Lens 6 — short interest: 21,188,522 shares, a quarter of the peak. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent of 137 FINRA settlements since January 15, 2021 — 21,188,522 shares were sold short, down 2.22% from the prior settlement. The series maximum, 85,504,087 shares on August 15, 2023 — verified by a maximum query over the whole series — leaves the latest 75.2% below it. The last five settlements read 27,425,456, 25,408,119, 21,591,738, 21,670,595 and 21,188,522. Against the year-ago 22,053,691 shares the latest is down 3.9%; against the June 30, 2026 settlement of 26,576,975 it is down 20.3%. Against 2,409,898,597 shares outstanding, it is 0.88% of the share count, at 3.65 days to cover.
The Gap
The narrative describes a defensive name that beat its quarter and raised its outlook — sales up 5.9%, adjusted earnings per share above consensus — and a stock that fell 5.6% on the day anyway. The filings describe positioning set before any of that was public, and the two ownership lenses point in opposite directions. The full market held 1,774,772,948 reported shares at June 30, up 247,678,461 shares (+16.22%), as its filer count rose by 101 to 4,687. The tracked cohort held 2,641,637 shares and cut 12.33% of them: five holders decreased, the largest single cut was Mairs & Power's 26.8%, one manager exited entirely, and the only increase in the whole cohort was the top holder's 0.8%. The 5% register holds no activist at all — one passive chain whose reported maximum, 10.1%, dates to January. Insiders have recorded one open-market purchase in the parsed record against 36 sales, and sold $67,779,422.92 in the last 90 days. The borrow, at 21,188,522 shares and 0.88% of the share count, is a quarter of its August 2023 peak. One plausible reading is that broad, passive accumulation carried the register while the tracked value cohort and the building's own officers trimmed into the same quarters. The record supports each clause separately; it does not say which side the next quarter favours.
What Would Change the Picture
Nothing above is a recommendation. It is a record. These filings would change the description:
- 1. The 2026Q3 13Fs (filing window closing mid-November 2026). The cohort held 2,641,637 shares at June 30 — twelve holders, 47.7% in Yacktman Asset Management's position. Yacktman adding or trimming moves this lens on its own; a second exit, after Pzena's, does the same.
- 2. A second insider purchase — the first in over a year of windows. The parsed record holds one purchase transaction across 122 filings, and none in the last 90 days. One more purchase doubles a count that currently has a single entry.
- 3. A fresh Vanguard print, or any SC 13D at all. The register's latest filing is dated May 1, 2026 and reports 7.49% as of March 31, 2026; every filing in the parse is passive. An activist 13D would be this lens's first.
- 4. Whether the borrow keeps fading, or rebuilds toward its June level. Short interest stands at 21,188,522 shares, 75.2% below the series maximum of 85,504,087. A reading back above the June 30 print of 26,576,975 extends a rebuild; a reading below the series minimum of 8,472,304 sets a new series low.
- 5. A second congressional member, or a second purchase. The combined record holds one member, one purchase and five sales. A trade by any other member gives this lens a second name to compare against.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by twelve of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 2,641,637 shares, nearly half of it one holder — whose insiders have bought once in the parsed record, whose 5% register is entirely passive, and whose borrow sits at a quarter of its 2023 peak.
As-of & Limits
The lenses rest on different clocks, none live: 13F is a June 30, 2026 snapshot published up to 45 days later; Form 4 runs through October 2, 2026; Congress through October 3, 2026 (Senate October 1); 13D/G through the May 1, 2026 filing; short interest through September 15, 2026; our price file ends October 2, 2026. One limit is specific to this name: the October 13 earnings — the reason for the search interest — postdate every lens here, and the earnings-day price move is known to this audit only from outside coverage, not from our own price file, so nothing in the tape yet reflects positioning after the results.
Related reading: Five of 83: Viking Is 70.9% of the Superinvestors' Morgan Stanley Stake. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #76; Ten of 83: One Holder Is 60.7% of the Superinvestors' CVS Health Stake. Its Insiders Filed Nothing in 90 Days. — Filing Tape #75; One of 83: Lone Pine Opened a New Nebius Position in Q2. Short Interest Is 18.49% of the Share Count. — Filing Tape #74. Johnson & Johnson's own page: Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) 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; Johnson & Johnson identified by CUSIP 478160104. Twelve distinct managers hold long positions totalling 2,641,637 shares; there are no option rows for this name in the collection. The direction count on the collection's labels, across the long rows, is five DECREASED (Jensen Investment Management, John Rogers - Ariel Investments, Mairs & Power Funds, Thomas Russo - Gardner Russo & Quinn, Tweedy Browne), five UNCHANGED (David Katz - Matrix Asset Advisors, Dodge & Cox Funds, Prem Watsa - Fairfax Financial Holdings, Thomas Gayner - Markel Group, Torray Funds), one INCREASED (Yacktman Asset Management) and one NEW (Christopher Bloomstran - Semper Augustus); the collection's exit list carries one Johnson & Johnson row, Richard Pzena - Pzena Investment Management (203,965 shares held previously). Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (3,012,988 long shares at March 31, in 12 rows; 2,641,637 long shares at June 30, a change of −371,351 shares or −12.33%) are from the site pipeline's holdings files on the same CUSIP basis in both quarters, and the pipeline's second-quarter totals match the EDGAR collection exactly on both shares and value (differences of 0 shares and $0). Yacktman Asset Management's share of the cohort is 47.7% = 1,259,977 / 2,641,637.
- 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; 4,672 reported long positions out of 4,687 filers). Johnson & Johnson reports under a single CUSIP, 478160104, and the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row matches the by-ticker row exactly on holders, shares, reported value, prior holders and prior value. The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (2,077 and 1,976, a net of +101 that matches the change in holder count) are gross flows, so this audit headlines the net change. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($445,603,071,206 over 1,774,772,948 shares) implies $251.08 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $253.97 in our price file, a gap of −1.1% — printed here as found. 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 (122 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 one in the full parsed record — 1,250 shares for $257,687.50 by one buyer, with zero officer purchases in every window — and zero in the 90-day window (July 5 to October 2, 2026). Sale transactions total 10 in the last 90 days (259,340 shares, $67,779,422.92, 5 sellers, all 10 of them officer sales), 29 in the last year (630,943 shares, $154,853,054.97, 10 sellers, all 29 officer sales) and 36 across the parsed record (869,612 shares, $196,774,793.58, 10 sellers, all 36 officer sales). The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 14, 2026, over a 90-day window) matches the full parse's 90-day window exactly on purchases (0), sales (10), sellers (5) and sale value ($67,779,422.92). The full-parse aggregate's sale-value totals imply $261.35 per share for the 90-day window, $245.43 for the one-year window and $226.28 for the full record, each inside the traded price range of its window on our price file ($247.02 to $278.43 for the 90-day window, $186.00 to $278.43 for the one-year window, and $142.06 to $278.43 across the price file), so the sale totals are cited as figures in this article. The single purchase implies $206.15 per share. "Bought once" in this audit means one purchase transaction in the parsed Form 4 record we maintain; it is a statement about that record, not about any individual's complete history.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G parsed filings (3 filings matching issuer CIK 200406 on CUSIP 478160104, 3 reporting-person rows across 2 names as filed: one SC 13G and two SC 13G/A filings, both of the latter amendments, with no SC 13D-family filing), filings through May 1, 2026. The site aggregation carries this name under a ticker-keyed row; that row (3 filings, 0 D-filings, 3 G-filings, 2 amendments, 2 reporters, latest date May 1, 2026, maximum 10.1% and 424,086,363.0 reported shares) matches the parsed filings on filings, form mix, amendments, latest date, maximum and reported-share total. The parsed reporting-person rows sum to 424,086,363.0 shares, but that total sums reporting-person rows across different dates, so it is not used as a stake figure in the article. The Vanguard chain (The Vanguard Group printing 243,455,135 shares at 10.1% as of January 30, 2026, filed February 5, 2026 as SC 13G/A; The Vanguard Group printing 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 26, 2026 as SC 13G/A; Vanguard Capital Management printing 180,631,228 shares at 7.49% as of March 31, 2026, filed May 1, 2026 as SC 13G) is reported as filed, under the names exactly as they appear. The parsed coverage for this issuer holds these 3 filings; a 5% holder that has not filed in the covered window would not appear here.
- Congress lens: Senate PTR archive and House PTR archive as maintained on this site. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026) carries one member, one purchase transaction, five sale transactions, a most recent purchase date of June 9, 2026 and a recorded party of D; the House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries one member, one purchase and four sales on the same dates; the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries zero members, no purchase and one sale for this ticker. The combined figures equal the House and Senate figures added together. This audit reports the aggregates as they stand; it does not reconstruct individual filers beyond what the aggregates carry.
- Short interest lens: FINRA Equity Short Interest files (biweekly settlement dates), collected directly from FINRA's public distribution. The published series covers 137 settlements from January 15, 2021 (first settlement in the series) to September 15, 2026. The latest reading is 21,188,522 shares on September 15, 2026, down 2.22% from the prior settlement (21,670,595 on August 31, 2026). The series maximum is 85,504,087 shares on August 15, 2023 (verified by a maximum query over the series, not read off the latest row), so the latest reading sits 75.2% below the maximum. The year-ago settlement (September 15, 2025) printed 22,053,691 shares, so the latest reading sits 3.9% below a year ago. The series minimum is 8,472,304 shares on January 13, 2023. The June 30, 2026 settlement printed 26,576,975 shares, so the latest reading sits 20.3% below the 13F snapshot date's borrow. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact, so the October price action is not yet in this series. The share-count ratio (0.88%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries Johnson & Johnson's revenue of $94,193,000,000, net income of $26,804,000,000 and assets of $199,210,000,000, each labelled fiscal 2025 in the file. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 2,409,898,597 (as of July 17, 2026 in the file, sourced in the file to the share count) and a file-computed market value of $613,993,961,601.89. The file does not flag the issuer as a foreign private issuer, and it carries SIC 2834, Pharmaceutical Preparations. The file's price for the name is $254.78 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $256.03, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for Johnson & Johnson through October 2, 2026 ($256.03 close, +23.7% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $278.43 on September 3, 2026, so the last close sits 8.0% below it; 252-session closing low $185.98 on October 2, 2025, so the last close sits 37.7% above it; closes of $244.44 at March 31, 2026 and $253.97 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of +3.9%; change from June 30 to October 2 of +0.8%; change from the September 30, 2025 close of $185.42 of +38.1%). The series in our price file begins June 1, 2021 at $165.53 and holds 1,342 rows.
- Market context sources: Google Trends United States list via a trends mirror (checked October 14, 2026; its stock-related entries — Netflix and Eli Lilly items — name companies already audited in this series, so the selection moved to the next source); MarketBeat Trending list (checked October 14, 2026; its top ten names were all already audited in this series or already set aside for missing lenses) and MarketBeat's top-five trending-stocks list (Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Tesla, Meta and Microsoft as presented in coverage; Johnson & Johnson the highest-ranked name not yet audited); third-quarter 2026 results reported October 13, 2026 (sales of $25,399 million, up 5.9% year over year; adjusted earnings per share of $2.59; reported earnings per share of $0.09; full-year 2026 guidance raised), as carried by the company's own release and earnings coverage, checked October 14, 2026; the $2.53 consensus figure and the October 13 close of $248.90, down 5.6% on the day, as carried by MarketBeat's earnings coverage, checked October 14, 2026. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out; the external items above are reported speech from those outlets, not GetCoattail measurements.
- Johnson & Johnson is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) stock page. Series data: jnj_lens_data.csv · jnj_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: Morgan Stanley · CVS Health.
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 14, 2026: first publication.