GetCoattail Research — McDonald's is the world's largest restaurant chain by system sales, and in October it sits twelfth on AltIndex's meme-stock list — while a run of analyst target cuts after its September investor day and a new 52-week low have made it a live argument. The filings describe a register narrowing at the top: seven tracked superinvestors hold the stock, one of them is 82.6% of the position, the cohort cut a quarter of its shares in a falling quarter, insiders have bought 145 shares in the entire parsed record, and the borrow sits at the top of its five-year range.
Start with the narrative. AltIndex's meme-stock list, updated on the night of October 11, ranked McDonald's twelfth by Reddit mentions over the prior 24 hours, with 30 mentions and a bullish sentiment flag, at a displayed price of $235.23. The news flow has been heavier than the ranking suggests: since the company's September 23 McDonald's NEXT strategy presentation — a plan reported at $8.5 billion of franchisee support through 2036 — a series of analysts have cut their price targets, among them Wells Fargo (from $300 to $270, keeping an Overweight rating), Guggenheim (from $290 to $250, Neutral), KeyCorp (from $305 to $280, Overweight) and Sanford C. Bernstein (from $295 to $250, Market Perform), as reported across financial outlets in the week to October 8. The broader consensus, as aggregated by MarketBeat and reported October 6, still reads Moderate Buy from 37 analysts with an average target of $297.76. On October 5 the stock printed a new 52-week low in news reports. Our own price file, which ends October 2, puts the last close at $231.89 — 32.0% below the 252-session closing high of $341.06 set on February 27, 2026, and just 0.4% above the 252-session closing low of $230.94 set on September 30, 2026.
Now the filings. For McDonald's — the thirty-ninth Filing Tape audit — the tape is a study in concentration and quiet: a tracked cohort that shrank by a quarter while the full market added shares, a 5% register with no activist filing at all, an insider record whose purchases total 145 shares, a single congressional member trading both ways, and a borrow at its series peak.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — seven holders, 3,423,420 shares, one of them 82.6%
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 7 held McDonald's long — no option rows — totalling 3,423,420 shares worth $925,384,473. The direction count, on the collection's own labels, is three unchanged, two decreased, one increased and one new: Viking Global Investors, the largest holder, is flagged new in our EDGAR collection, a label we qualify below and in the methodology.
Viking Global Investors holds 2,829,158 shares worth $764,749,699, a 2.18% portfolio weight — 82.6% of the tracked cohort's McDonald's shares. The other six holders together hold less than a quarter of Viking's position: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust holds 334,900 shares worth $90,526,819 (0.26% weight, unchanged), Jensen Investment Management holds 225,570 shares worth $60,973,827 (1.48% weight, decreased 18.3%), Mairs & Power Funds holds 14,085 shares worth $3,807,244 (decreased 1.7%), David Katz's Matrix Asset Advisors holds 12,335 shares worth $3,334,158 (increased 1027.5% — from a 1,094-share base), Dodge & Cox Funds holds 6,425 shares worth $1,736,742 (unchanged), and Thomas Russo's Gardner Russo & Quinn holds 947 shares worth $255,984 (unchanged). The cohort total moved from 4,555,228 shares at March 31 to 3,423,420 at June 30, a change of -24.85%, a difference of -1,131,808 shares — and the register underneath lost two members: at March 31 the nine rows were Viking (3,625,029 shares on the pipeline basis), Gates (334,900), Jensen (276,262), Maverick Capital (294,100), Mairs & Power (14,329), Dodge & Cox (6,425), First Pacific Advisors (2,142), Katz (1,094) and Russo (947), and both Maverick Capital and First Pacific Advisors appear in the collection's exit lists for this name in the second quarter. One label needs care: our EDGAR collection flags Viking's second-quarter row as a new position, but the site pipeline's first-quarter holdings file carries a 3,625,029-share McDonald's row filed under Viking's own accession prefix — on that basis Viking's position fell 21.95% rather than appearing from nowhere. Every other holder's direction label matches the pipeline recalculation exactly, the two collections' second-quarter totals match to the share, and we use the pipeline basis for quarter changes throughout (see methodology). The price fell from $310.79 at March 31 to $270.31 at June 30, a change of -13.0%, and the cohort's reported value implies $270.31 per share, matching the June 30 close exactly.
Lens 2: institutions — 3,468 filers, shares up 14.95%, filers down 69
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the June quarter was accumulation by a slightly narrower register. At June 30, 2026, 3,468 institutions reported positions, down 69 from 3,537 at March 31 (-1.95%), and 3,459 reported long positions. Reported shares rose 14.95%, from 454,163,859 to 522,064,839 shares — 67,900,980 more shares than the prior quarter, spread across fewer filers. Reported aggregate value rose 2.62% to $140,845,125,033; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The implied value per share, $269.78, sits 0.2% below the June 30 close of $270.31. Set the two 13F lenses side by side and they point in opposite directions again: the full market's share count grew 14.95% while the tracked cohort's fell 24.85%. The broad register did the accumulating this quarter; the famous names reduced, and one famous name is most of what remains.
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 McDonald's — six SC 13G originals and four SC 13G/A amendments, and no SC 13D filing at all, five reporting persons on a row basis, the most recent filed August 7, 2026. The register's maximum percentage belongs to The Vanguard Group: 71,635,329 shares (10.03%) as of August 29, 2025, followed by a later amendment printing 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026 — while Vanguard Capital Management, a separate reporting-person name, printed 53,486,415 shares (7.52%) as of March 31, 2026. We report the rows exactly as filed and never merge the two Vanguard names. State Street Corporation is the register's steadiest row: 35,988,736 shares (5.1%) as of December 31, 2025, then 35,458,503 shares (5.0%) as of March 31, 2026, then 36,120,258 shares (5.1%) as of June 30, 2026, in the filing dated August 7, 2026 — the register's latest. JPMorgan Chase appears under two punctuations, exactly as filed: as JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. it printed 35,931,728 shares (5.0%) as of March 31, 2025, then 33,434,457 shares (4.6%) as of June 30, 2025, then 30,960,253 shares (4.3%) as of June 30, 2026; as JPMORGAN CHASE & CO it printed 36,914,418 shares (5.1%) as of March 31, 2026. We report rows as filed and never sum them: 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 — five purchases totalling 145 shares in the parsed record, $59,539,379.97 of sales
The parsed Form 4 record holds 121 filings through October 2, 2026. Across it, open-market purchases total five transactions — 145 shares, $40,073.80, one buyer — and none of the five is recorded as an officer purchase. Against that stand 45 sales totalling 188,641.04 shares and $59,539,379.97, by ten sellers, every one of the 45 recorded as an officer sale. The last year holds the same shape in sharper form: zero purchases against 22 sales of 127,070.66 shares for $40,526,697.56 by eight sellers, every one recorded as an officer sale. The last 90 days hold neither side: zero purchases and zero sales across four filings — the register has simply gone quiet since the summer. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 11 over its 90-day window, carries no McDonald's row at all, which is consistent with the full parse's empty 90-day window rather than in conflict with it; we headline the full parse and print both facts in the methodology rather than implying they are one number. We assign no motives to any of it; the record's shape is the fact — and the shape here is close to one-directional across the whole coverage, with a single buyer's 145 shares on the other side.
Lens 5: Congress — one member, one purchase, two sales
Across the congressional record we maintain (combined record as of October 3, 2026), McDonald's shows one member, one purchase transaction and two sale transactions, with the most recent purchase dated August 26, 2026, and the member's party recorded as Republican. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries one member with one purchase and one sale and the same last-buy date of August 26, 2026; the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) records one sale transaction and no purchases. Congressional disclosures report value ranges rather than amounts, so this lens records direction and counts only; here it records a small, two-sided presence — the only lens in this audit where the tracked money bought and sold in the same period.
Lens 6: short interest — 12,196,481 shares, at the top of the five-year range
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 137 settlements, from January 15, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 12,196,481 McDonald's shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 2.79, down 0.72% from the prior settlement. Against the fundamentals file's 707,641,531 shares outstanding, that is 1.72% of the share count. The long view is what makes this reading unusual: the series maximum is 12,284,728 shares at the August 31, 2026 settlement — the settlement immediately before the latest — so the borrow is sitting essentially at the highest level in the 137-settlement record, 0.7% below its peak. The recent direction built to that peak: the borrow printed 10,976,120 shares at the June 30, 2026 settlement — the same date the 13F lenses snapshot — and has since risen 11.1% to the latest reading. Year over year the latest reading is up 48.1% from 8,234,303 shares on September 15, 2025. The series minimum is 5,069,245 shares on February 26, 2021 — the current borrow is more than twice that level.
The recent settlements run 11,465,084 on July 15, then 12,255,302, 11,058,134, 12,284,728 and 12,196,481 — a borrow oscillating at the top of its range rather than retreating from it. Set beside the price file, the geometry is the quarter's story in one line: the stock closed at $231.89 on October 2, 0.4% above its 252-session closing low, while the borrow against it stands at its record.
The gap, stated plainly
The registers describe a company the analyst community spent October marking down — target cut after target cut, a consensus average target of $297.76 that sits well above the price — months after its institutions had already moved, in opposite directions. The tracked superinvestors held 3,423,420 shares at June 30 — seven holders, Viking's 2,829,158 shares at 82.6% of it — having fallen 24.85% in a quarter when the price fell 13.0%, after Maverick Capital and First Pacific Advisors exited. The full market moved the other way: 3,468 filers, down 69, holding 522,064,839 reported shares, up 67,900,980. The 5% register printed ten filings, every one of them passive: a Vanguard Group row that went from 10.03% to zero under that name while a Vanguard Capital Management row printed 7.52%, a State Street row steady near 5.1%, and not one 13D. Insiders, across 121 parsed filings, have recorded five open-market purchases totalling 145 shares and $40,073.80 — one buyer, no officers — against $59,539,379.97 of sales by ten sellers, and nothing at all in the last 90 days. Congress registers one member trading both ways. And the borrow, at 12,196,481 shares, sits 0.7% below the highest reading in its 137-settlement history while the price sits 0.4% above its 252-session closing low. One plausible reading is that the registers run on different clocks and different mandates: the broad market spent the June quarter accumulating a stock its tracked-fund register was cutting by a quarter, no activist has filed on the name, its own insiders have been near-silent buyers across the whole record, and short sellers have built the largest borrow in the series' history into the drawdown. 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 3,423,420 shares at June 30 across seven holders, after a 24.85% cut, with Viking Global Investors at 2,829,158 shares. Whether that position rebuilds, holds or disappears is most of the lens; a Maverick Capital or First Pacific Advisors return would be the rest of it.
- 2. Insider purchases beyond 145 shares. The parsed record holds five purchase transactions totalling 145 shares and $40,073.80, by one buyer, against $59,539,379.97 of sales — and no transactions at all in the last 90 days. Any officer purchase print, or a purchase programme larger than the record's entire history, 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 Vanguard Capital Management's 53,486,415-share row (7.52%). A first 13D — any filer declaring active intent — would change this lens from a register of index positions into something else.
- 4. Whether the borrow leaves its peak. Short interest printed its series maximum of 12,284,728 shares at the August 31, 2026 settlement and stands at 12,196,481. A sustained fall would end the record-level borrow; a new maximum would extend it.
- 5. Whether Congress adds a second member. The congressional register holds one member, one purchase 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 seven of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 3,423,420 shares, 82.6% of it one holder, after a 24.85% one-quarter cut in which two holders exited — whose full market added 67,900,980 reported shares in the same quarter, whose 5% register is entirely passive paper, whose insiders have bought 145 shares in total across the parsed record against $59,539,379.97 of sales, whose congressional register is a single member trading both ways, and whose borrow sits at the top of its five-year range while the price sits at the bottom of its own.
Related reading: Two of 83: The Superinvestors Cut eBay 31.4% in Q2. GameStop's Filings Show a 9.8% Stake. — Filing Tape #38; Two of 83: One Holder Is 99.9% of the Superinvestors' Toast Stake. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #37; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. McDonald's own page: McDonald's Corporation (MCD) 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; McDonald's identified by CUSIP 580135101. Seven distinct managers hold long positions totalling 3,423,420 shares; all seven reported rows are long (no put or call rows); directions on the collection's labels are three unchanged, two decreased, one increased and one new, and the collection's exit lists contain two rows for this CUSIP (Lee Ainslie - Maverick Capital, 294,100 shares, prior reported value $91,403,339; First Pacific Advisors, 2,142 shares, prior reported value $665,712). Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (4,555,228 shares at March 31 across nine filing rows — Viking Global Investors 3,625,029, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust 334,900, Jensen Investment Management 276,262, Maverick Capital 294,100, Mairs & Power Funds 14,329, Dodge & Cox Funds 6,425, First Pacific Advisors 2,142, David Katz - Matrix Asset Advisors 1,094 and Thomas Russo - Gardner Russo & Quinn 947 on the pipeline's CUSIP basis; 3,423,420 shares at June 30 across seven filing rows; change -24.85%) 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). One label difference is disclosed rather than resolved: the EDGAR collection flags Viking Global Investors' second-quarter row NEW, while the pipeline's first-quarter file carries the 3,625,029-share row above under an accession prefix matching Viking's CIK; on the pipeline basis Viking's position changed by -21.95% (2,829,158 / 3,625,029 − 1). The other six holders' collection labels all match pipeline recalculation exactly (Jensen -18.3%, Mairs & Power -1.7%, Katz +1027.5%, Gates, Dodge & Cox and Russo unchanged). This audit uses pipeline-basis quarter changes and collection labels only where the two agree. Viking Global Investors' share of the cohort is 82.6% = 2,829,158 / 3,423,420.
- 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; 3,459 of the 3,468 reported long positions), and its figures match the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for 580135101 exactly on holders, shares, reported value, prior holders and prior reported value. The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (1,999 and 2,068, a net of -69 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 ($140,845,125,033 over 522,064,839 shares) implies ≈$269.78 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $270.31 in our price file, a gap of -0.2%. 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 (121 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 5 across the parsed record (145 shares, $40,073.80, one buyer), and none of the five is recorded as an officer purchase. Sale transactions total 45 across the record (188,641.04 shares, $59,539,379.97, ten sellers), all 45 recorded as officer sales. In the year through October 2, 2026: zero purchases and 22 sales (127,070.66 shares, $40,526,697.56, eight sellers, all 22 recorded as officer sales). In the 90 days through October 2, 2026: zero purchases and zero sales across four filings. The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 11, 2026, 90-day window) carries no McDonald's row; its window is a zero-activity window in the full parse as well, so the two are consistent in direction, and both facts are printed here rather than blended. "Purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 121 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G aggregation and parsed filings (10 filings matching CUSIP 580135101 and issuer CIK 63908, five reporting persons on a row basis: 6 SC 13G originals and 4 SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through August 7, 2026. The Vanguard Group's rows (71,635,329 shares at 10.03% as of August 29, 2025, filed September 8, 2025; 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026), Vanguard Capital Management's row (53,486,415 shares at 7.52% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 30, 2026), State Street Corporation's rows (35,988,736 shares at 5.1% as of December 31, 2025; 35,458,503 shares at 5.0% as of March 31, 2026; 36,120,258 shares at 5.1% as of June 30, 2026, filed August 7, 2026), JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.'s rows (35,931,728 shares at 5.0% as of March 31, 2025; 33,434,457 shares at 4.6% as of June 30, 2025; 30,960,253 shares at 4.3% as of June 30, 2026) and JPMORGAN CHASE & CO's row (36,914,418 shares at 5.1% as of March 31, 2026) are reported as filed, under the reporting-person names exactly as they appear. No rows are summed, because the aggregation's totalSharesReported field (369,930,097 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, one purchase transaction, two sale transactions, most recent purchase August 26, 2026, party Republican. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries one member with one purchase and one sale and the same last-buy date; the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) records one sale transaction and no purchases (its members field reads 0). 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 137 settlements from January 15, 2021 (5,109,524 shares) to September 15, 2026. The maximum of the series is 12,284,728 shares on August 31, 2026, so the latest reading of 12,196,481 shares on September 15, 2026 sits 0.7% below the peak ((12,196,481 / 12,284,728) − 1), 11.1% above the June 30, 2026 settlement reading of 10,976,120, and 48.1% above the September 15, 2025 reading of 8,234,303; the change from the prior settlement is -0.72%. The latest row's prior-settlement field (12,284,728) matches the prior settlement file's reported figure exactly. The series minimum is 5,069,245 shares on February 26, 2021. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact. The share-count ratio (1.72%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries McDonald's revenue of $26,885,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, its net income of $8,563,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, and its assets of $59,515,000,000 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 707,641,531 (as of June 30, 2026, sourced in the file to an EntityCommonStockSharesOutstanding count) and a file-computed market value of $164,491,271,721.40. The file's price for the name is $232.45 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $231.89, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for McDonald's through October 2, 2026 ($231.89 close, -24.1% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $341.06 on February 27, 2026; 252-session closing low $230.94 on September 30, 2026; closes of $310.79 at March 31, 2026 and $270.31 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of -13.0%; change from June 30 to October 2 of -14.2% ((231.89 / 270.31) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -32.0%, and the latest close sits +0.4% above the 252-session closing low ((231.89 / 230.94) − 1).
- Market context sources: AltIndex's meme-stock list as updated on the night of October 11, 2026 (McDonald's twelfth by Reddit mentions over the prior 24 hours, 30 mentions, bullish sentiment flag, displayed price $235.23), checked October 11, 2026; the run of analyst target cuts reported across financial outlets in the week to October 8, 2026 following the company's September 23, 2026 McDonald's NEXT strategy presentation (Wells Fargo $300 to $270, Overweight maintained; Guggenheim $290 to $250, Neutral maintained; KeyCorp $305 to $280, Overweight maintained; Sanford C. Bernstein $295 to $250, Market Perform maintained; the NEXT plan reported at $8.5 billion of franchisee support through 2036), checked October 11, 2026 and summarised in our own words; the analyst backdrop aggregated by MarketBeat (Moderate Buy consensus, average price target of $297.76, 37 analysts) as reported October 6, 2026; and news reports of a new 52-week low on October 5, 2026. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- McDonald's is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: McDonald's Corporation (MCD) stock page. Series data: mcd_lens_data.csv · mcd_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: eBay · Toast · 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.