GetCoattail Research — Medtronic is the medical-device maker that just raised its fiscal 2027 guidance after a double-digit growth quarter, and it sits second on MarketBeat's October 11 healthcare watchlist. The filings describe a register that bought the dip in unusual unison: seven tracked superinvestors hold it, five of them increased in the second quarter while the price fell 9.7%, the cohort's share count rose 17.22%, the full market's filer count fell by 76 even as its share count rose 12.72%, insiders have recorded exactly two purchases in the entire parsed record, and short interest jumped 42% in a single September settlement after three straight declines.
Start with the narrative. Medtronic reported its fiscal first quarter, ended July 31, 2026, on September 1: revenue of $9.756 billion, up 13.7% from a year earlier, GAAP diluted earnings of $1.14 a share and non-GAAP earnings of $1.45, ahead of the $1.39 consensus. The company noted the quarter included an extra fiscal week worth roughly $570 million, and it raised its fiscal 2027 guidance anyway — organic revenue growth of 7.25% to 7.75% and non-GAAP earnings of $5.94 to $6.00 a share. September then brought a structural event: on September 14 the company launched its exchange offer to split off the MiniMed diabetes business, on October 7 it fixed the final exchange ratio at 4.5939 MiniMed shares for each Medtronic share accepted, and the offer was scheduled to expire on October 9. Analysts, in aggregate, lean positive with trimmed conviction: MarketBeat's count on October 6 was 19 Buy ratings and 9 Hold, with an average target of $103.92; Barclays opened coverage at Equal Weight with a $95 target, while TD Cowen holds a Buy and a $110 target. Our own price file, which ends October 6, puts the last close at $86.83 — down 17.6% from the 252-session closing high of $105.35 set on November 25, 2025, up 17.7% from the 252-session closing low of $73.75 set on June 2, 2026, and down 9.6% year to date on that file.
Now the filings. For Medtronic — the fifty-first Filing Tape audit — the tape shows a tracked cohort that added into a falling quarter, a broad register that shrank in names while growing in shares, an insider record with two purchases in its entire parsed history, and a borrow that reversed direction violently in September.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — seven holders, five increases, and a 17.22% add in a down quarter
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 7 held Medtronic long — no option rows — totalling 26,449,181 shares worth $2,069,119,491. The direction count, on the collection's own labels, is no new positions, five increases, two decreases and none unchanged, with one exit: Polen Capital Management, which had held 60,661 shares. The cohort total moved from 22,563,550 shares at March 31, across eight filing rows including Polen's, to 26,449,181 at June 30, a change of +17.22%, a difference of +3,885,631 shares.
The largest holder is First Eagle Investment Management, with 13,783,983 shares worth $1,078,321,025, a 1.77% portfolio weight, flagged increased by 37.2% — 52.1% of the tracked cohort's Medtronic shares. Dodge & Cox Funds holds 7,875,898 shares worth $616,131,501, a 0.32% weight, flagged increased by 2.4%. Richard Pzena's Pzena Investment Management holds 3,147,999 shares worth $246,267,980, a 0.72% weight, flagged decreased by 0.3%. Harry Burn's Sound Shore holds 838,573 shares worth $65,601,566, a 2.02% weight, flagged increased by 1.6%. David Katz's Matrix Asset Advisors holds 433,672 shares worth $33,926,178, a 2.76% weight, flagged increased by 15.4%. Mairs & Power Funds holds 363,349 shares worth $28,424,782, flagged decreased by 9.6%. Hillman Capital Management holds 5,707 shares worth $446,459, flagged increased by 55.6%. Per-holder quarter changes matched by share-count continuity agree with the collection's own percentage labels for all seven continuing holders — there is no label mismatch in this register. The cohort's implied price, $78.23 per share, sits exactly on the June 30 close of $78.23. The price fell from $86.65 at March 31 to $78.23 at June 30, a change of -9.7% — this register added 17.22% more shares into that fall, and five of its seven members did the adding.
Lens 2: institutions — 76 fewer filers, 122 million more shares
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the register consolidates. At June 30, 2026, 2,111 institutions reported positions, down 76 from 2,187 at March 31 (-3.48%), and 2,106 reported long positions. Reported shares rose 12.72%, from 961,965,968 to 1,084,321,129 shares — 122,355,161 more shares than the prior quarter, spread across fewer filers. Reported aggregate value rose 3.43% to $84,476,787,292; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The implied value per share, $77.91, sits 0.4% below the June 30 close of $78.23 — a small gap, and one more reason the share count, not the dollar total, is the headline figure here. The two 13F lenses rhyme rather than repeat: the tracked cohort added 17.22% with five of seven members increasing, and the broad market added 12.72% more shares while 76 filers left the register entirely.
Lens 3: the 5% register — four filings, all of them 13G paper, and a Vanguard hand-off
Our full parse holds four SC 13D/G filings for Medtronic — one SC 13G and three SC 13G/A amendments, and no SC 13D of any kind in the parsed set, 4 reporting-person rows across 3 names, the most recent filed April 28, 2026. The oldest row is also the plainest: BlackRock, Inc. prints 88,655,585 shares (6.9%) as of March 31, 2025 in an SC 13G/A filed April 23, 2025. The Vanguard rows tell the hand-off story this series keeps meeting. In an SC 13G/A filed December 3, 2025, The Vanguard Group prints 130,949,305 shares (10.21%) as of November 28, 2025 — the register's maximum row. In an SC 13G/A filed March 27, 2026, the same name prints 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026. And the register's most recent filing is its only original filing: Vanguard Capital Management prints 96,424,044 shares (7.51%) as of March 31, 2026 in an SC 13G filed April 28, 2026. Read as filed — and the rows are reported here exactly as filed, never summed — the register describes one Vanguard entity's row moving from 10.21% to zero and another Vanguard entity's row at 7.51%, alongside a BlackRock row at 6.9%. There is no activist paper in this register and no 13D at all: four 13G-family filings, three names, and the largest of them passive index complexes.
Lens 4: insiders — two purchases in the entire parsed record, against 21 sales
The parsed Form 4 record holds 89 filings through October 2, 2026. Across the whole record, open-market purchases total exactly 2 transactions — 5,000 shares for $462,750.00, by one buyer, and neither of them recorded as an officer purchase. Against that stand 21 sales totalling 122,190 shares and $11,623,864.59, by four sellers, all 21 of them recorded as officer sales. The last year holds 16 of those sales, totalling 91,298 shares and $8,924,448.19 by three sellers, and no purchases. The recent window is the same shape: the last 90 days hold two sales and no purchases — 4,585 shares for $396,814.25, by two sellers, both officer sales. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 12 over its 90-day window, records one sale of $138,882.95 by one seller and no purchases; the two collections' 90-day windows start on different dates (the site's about July 14, the parse's July 5), which is why the sale counts differ — on purchases, both collections agree the count is zero. We assign no motives to any of it; a tape with two purchases and 21 sales in the parsed record is the fact.
Lens 5: Congress — three sales, no buys, and no buy date at all
Across the congressional record we maintain (combined record as of October 3, 2026), Medtronic shows zero buy transactions and three sell transactions, with no most-recent buy date recorded; the combined aggregate prints a member count of zero for this name, and we report that exactly as it prints rather than smoothing it over. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the whole register: the same zero buys and three sells, and the same absence of a buy date. The Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Medtronic row at all — we report that absence as the aggregate prints it. Whatever the register's counting quirk, its direction is unambiguous: in the congressional tape this name has only ever been sold.
Lens 6: short interest — 17,229,743 shares, after a 42% jump in one settlement
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 137 settlements, from January 15, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 17,229,743 Medtronic shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 1.97. The path matters more than the level: the borrow fell for three straight settlements, from 19,025,990 shares on July 15 to 12,134,511 on August 31, and then jumped 41.99% in a single settlement to the latest print. That reading still sits below the series maximum: the peak is 19,723,625 shares on January 30, 2026, a fact we verified by taking the maximum across the whole series, and the latest reading sits 12.6% below it. Against the fundamentals file's 1,279,137,890 shares outstanding, that is 1.35% of the share count. Against September 15, 2025 the latest reading is up 34.7% from 12,788,226 shares. The June 30, 2026 settlement — the date the 13F lenses snapshot — printed 19,087,345 shares, nearer the peak than the present. The recent settlements run 19,025,990 on July 15, then 18,120,230, 14,350,429, 12,134,511 and 17,229,743. The series minimum is 6,340,022 shares on July 31, 2023; the latest reading sits about 2.7 times that low.
The borrow spent the summer unwinding and then, in one September settlement, took most of it back. Set beside the ownership lenses, that leaves a register where the long side added through the second quarter and the short side re-armed in September — after the quarter the ownership lenses describe had already closed.
The gap, stated plainly
The narrative describes a device maker whose fiscal first quarter grew revenue 13.7% to $9.756 billion, whose management raised full-year guidance on the strength of it, whose diabetes split-off moved from launch to a fixed exchange ratio in under a month, rated 19 Buy against 9 Hold with an average target of $103.92 — above the $86.83 close on our price file through October 6 — with its newest coverage an Equal Weight and a $95 target. The tracked superinvestors held 26,449,181 shares at June 30 across seven holders, having added 17.22% in a quarter when the price fell 9.7%, with five increases, two decreases, no new position and one small exit, and with First Eagle at 52.1% of the cohort after raising its own stake 37.2%. The full market consolidated the same way, larger: 1,084,321,129 reported shares, up 122,355,161, across 2,111 filers — 76 fewer than the prior quarter. The 5% register printed four filings, all of them 13G-family paper and not one a 13D: a BlackRock row at 6.9%, one Vanguard entity moving from 10.21% to zero, another at 7.51%. Insiders, across 89 parsed filings, recorded two purchases totalling $462,750.00 against 21 sales totalling $11,623,864.59. Congress registers three sells and no buys, with no buy date on record. And the borrow, after three settlements of decline, jumped 41.99% in one step to 17,229,743 shares. One plausible reading is that the registers are describing different Medtronic stories on different clocks: the long registers used a down second quarter to concentrate — fewer filers, more shares, a tracked cohort adding in near-unison — the insider and congressional tapes kept their long-standing sell-only shape, the analysts are paying for a growth-and-separation story the September quarter partly supported, and short sellers, having spent the summer covering, rebuilt a third of the position in a single September settlement, after the MiniMed exchange terms were set. The record supports each clause separately; it does not say which register is right, and it cannot — the tracked cohort's whole position is a June 30 snapshot of 26,449,181 shares.
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 26,449,181 shares at June 30 across seven holders, after a +17.22% move with five increases. Whether First Eagle's 13,783,983 shares — 52.1% of the cohort — keep growing is the first thing the next register will answer: a reversal by the cohort's majority holder would flip this audit's central fact, and a second straight quarter of broad increases would make the Q2 add a pattern rather than an event.
- 2. A third insider purchase. The parsed record holds exactly 2 purchase transactions against 21 sales across 89 filings, and none in the last year. Any open-market purchase, by any insider, would be the first in over a year and only the third of its kind in the parsed record.
- 3. An original SC 13D, or a non-index 13G. The 5% register holds four filings, all 13G-family, three names, all of them passive complexes. A first 13D in the parsed set — any filer declaring an active stake — would change this lens from passive paper into something else.
- 4. Whether the borrow holds its September jump. Short interest stands at 17,229,743 shares, up 41.99% in one settlement after three declines, and 12.6% below the January 30, 2026 peak of 19,723,625. A settlement above that peak would mark a new high for the borrow; a return below the August 31, 2026 print of 12,134,511 would mark the jump as a one-settlement spike.
- 5. Whether the filer count keeps falling while shares rise. The broad register lost 76 filers in the second quarter while adding 122,355,161 reported shares. A second straight quarter of that pairing would deepen the consolidation this audit describes; a broadening register would unwind it.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by seven of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 26,449,181 shares, up 17.22% in the quarter its price fell 9.7%, with five increases and one holder at 52.1% — whose full market shed 76 filers while adding 122,355,161 reported shares in the same quarter, whose 5% register is four 13G-family filings across three passive names, whose insiders have recorded two purchases and 21 sales in the entire parsed record, whose congressional register holds three sells and no buys, and whose borrow jumped 42% in a single September settlement — all of it snapshot at June 30, in a quarter the long registers spent concentrating.
Related reading: Seven of 83: One Holder Is 77.7% of the Superinvestors' Costco Stake. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #50; Ten of 83: Lone Pine Opened a 2.6 Million-Share Home Depot Position as the Cohort Tripled Its Stake — Filing Tape #49; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. Medtronic's own page: Medtronic plc (MDT) 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; Medtronic identified by CUSIP G5960L103. Seven distinct managers hold long positions totalling 26,449,181 shares; all seven reported rows are long (no put or call rows); the direction count on the collection's labels is no new, five increased, two decreased and none unchanged, and the collection's exit list contains one Medtronic row (Polen Capital Management, 60,661 shares at the prior quarter). Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (22,563,550 shares at March 31 across eight filing rows; 26,449,181 shares at June 30 across seven filing rows; change +17.22%) are from the site pipeline's holdings files on the same CUSIP basis in both quarters, and the pipeline's second-quarter share and value totals match the EDGAR collection's long totals exactly (differences of 0 shares and $0). Per-holder quarter changes are matched by share-count continuity across the two pipeline files and agree with the EDGAR collection's own percentage labels for all seven continuing holders. First Eagle's share of the cohort is 52.1% = 13,783,983 / 26,449,181.
- 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; 2,106 reported long positions out of 2,111 filers). Medtronic reports under the single CUSIP G5960L103, and the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for that CUSIP matches the by-ticker row exactly (2,111 filers; 1,084,321,129 shares; $84,476,787,292 reported; 2,187 prior filers; $81,675,168,049 prior reported value). The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (1,546 and 1,622, a net of -76 that matches the change in holder count) are gross flows, so this audit headlines the net change. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($84,476,787,292 over 1,084,321,129 shares) implies ≈$77.91 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $78.23 in our price file, a gap of -0.4%. 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 (89 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 exactly 2 across the parsed record (5,000 shares, $462,750.00, one buyer, none of them officer purchases) — and zero in both the 90-day window and the last year. Sale transactions total 21 across the record (122,190 shares, $11,623,864.59, four sellers, all 21 of them officer sales); the 90-day window holds two of them (4,585 shares, $396,814.25, two sellers, both officer sales) and no purchases, and the last year holds sixteen (91,298 shares, $8,924,448.19, three sellers). The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 12, 2026, 90-day window) records one sale — 1 transaction, $138,882.95, one seller — and no purchases; its window starts about July 14 while the full parse's 90-day window starts July 5, so the sale counts differ while the purchase count, zero, agrees. We report both figures rather than choosing one silently. "Purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 89 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G parsed filings (4 filings matching issuer CIK 1613103 on CUSIP G5960L103, 4 reporting-person rows across 3 names: one SC 13G and three SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through April 28, 2026. The site aggregation's by-ticker file carries no MDT row, so this audit's 13D/G figures come from the parsed filings themselves, and we say so rather than treating the aggregate's silence as an empty register. BlackRock's row (88,655,585 shares at 6.9% as of March 31, 2025, filed April 23, 2025), The Vanguard Group's rows (130,949,305 shares at 10.21% as of November 28, 2025, filed December 3, 2025; then 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026) and Vanguard Capital Management's row (96,424,044 shares at 7.51% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 28, 2026) are reported as filed, under the reporting-person names exactly as they appear. No rows are summed, because aggregation totals across these rows would add 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 — zero buy transactions and three sell transactions, with no most-recent buy date, and a member count that the combined aggregate prints as zero for this name, reported here exactly as printed. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries zero buys and three sells with no most-recent buy. The Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Medtronic row, and this audit reports that absence exactly as the aggregate prints it. The aggregates record counts and dates, not trade sizes, and this audit reports them on that basis.
- 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 (6,628,179 shares) to September 15, 2026. The latest reading is 17,229,743 shares on September 15, 2026, which sits 12.6% below the series maximum of 19,723,625 shares on January 30, 2026 (verified by a maximum query over the series, not read off the latest row), up 34.7% from the September 15, 2025 reading of 12,788,226 and up 41.99% from the prior settlement (12,134,511 on August 31, 2026), after declines at the July 31, August 14 and August 31 settlements. The series minimum is 6,340,022 shares on July 31, 2023. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact. The share-count ratio (1.35%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries Medtronic's revenue of $36,364,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026, its net income of $4,801,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026, and its assets of $93,028,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 1,279,137,890 (as of August 28, 2026, sourced in the file to a dei EntityCommonStockSharesOutstanding count) and a file-computed market value of $111,400,114,155.76. The file's price for the name is $87.09 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 6, 2026 at $86.83, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for Medtronic through October 6, 2026 ($86.83 close, -9.6% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $105.35 on November 25, 2025; 252-session closing low $73.75 on June 2, 2026; closes of $86.65 at March 31, 2026 and $78.23 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of -9.7%; change from June 30 to October 6 of +11.0% ((86.83 / 78.23) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -17.6%, the gain from the 252-session closing low is +17.7%, and the series in our price file begins June 1, 2021.
- Market context sources: MarketBeat's Promising Healthcare Stocks to Keep An Eye On list for October 11, 2026 (Moderna first, Medtronic second — MarketBeat screener reporting, rechecked October 12, 2026); the company's fiscal first-quarter results as reported in September–October 2026 coverage of the September 1, 2026 release (revenue of $9.756 billion, up 13.7%; GAAP diluted earnings of $1.14 a share; non-GAAP diluted earnings of $1.45 against a $1.39 consensus; an extra fiscal week worth roughly $570 million; fiscal 2027 guidance raised to organic revenue growth of 7.25% to 7.75% and non-GAAP earnings of $5.94 to $6.00 — company release as reported by multiple outlets, cross-checked against each other); the MiniMed exchange offer (launched September 14, 2026; final ratio of 4.5939 MiniMed shares per accepted Medtronic share set October 7, 2026; expiry October 9, 2026 — company releases as reported in October 2026 coverage); the consensus detail (19 Buy, 9 Hold across 28 firms; average target $103.92 — MarketBeat data as reported October 6, 2026); the Barclays initiation (Equal Weight, $95 target) and the TD Cowen rating (Buy, $110 target), both as reported in October 2026 coverage. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- Medtronic is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Medtronic plc (MDT) stock page. Series data: mdt_lens_data.csv · mdt_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: Costco · Home Depot · 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 12, 2026: first publication.