RESEARCH — THE FILING TAPE #18

Seven of 83: One Holder Is 94.1% of the Superinvestors' Nike Stake. Short Interest Just Hit a Record.

October 9, 2026

GetCoattail Research — Nike is the market's broken turnaround story: a fiscal first quarter that beat on earnings and missed on revenue, full-year guidance for a high-single-digit revenue decline, and a stock that closed at its 252-session low on October 2. We ran it through every filing lens we maintain. Seven of our 83 tracked superinvestors hold it at all — and one of them is 94.1% of the entire cohort. Short interest, meanwhile, has risen to the highest reading in the entire collected series.

Start with the narrative, because at the moment it is an earnings-and-guidance story. Nike reported fiscal 2027 first-quarter results on October 1, 2026, for the quarter ended August 31: revenue of $11.21 billion, down 4.3% year over year and below a consensus near $11.32–11.4 billion, against earnings per share of $0.48, above a $0.43–0.44 consensus and down 2% year over year. Gross margin expanded 60 basis points to 42.8%, and net income fell 2% to $712 million. The weakness was specific: Greater China revenue fell 22% to $1.18 billion, Nike Direct revenue fell 8% with digital sales down 13%, and Converse revenue fell 28% to $263 million. The outlook did the damage: management guided fiscal 2027 revenue to a high-single-digit decline and adjusted earnings per share to $1.15–1.35, well below the roughly $1.65 analysts had expected, alongside a Pace restructuring programme targeting $2.5 billion of savings with workforce reductions beginning in calendar 2027. Shares fell roughly 8–9% in after-hours and premarket reports; our own price file puts the October 1 close at $35.15 and the October 2 close at $33.87, down 3.6% on the day and the lowest close in 252 sessions. MarketBeat's consensus is Hold with an average target of $42.12 — one Strong Buy, nine Buy, twenty-two Hold and seven Sell ratings — and the days after the print brought a run of target cuts, including BTIG from $55 to $50, Robert W. Baird from $44 to $36, Stifel from $40 to $36 and Citigroup from $39 to $32. Social attention followed the fall: Nike drew 76 Reddit mentions in the 24 hours to October 8 in AltIndex's ranking.

Now the filings. GetCoattail tracks the investors best placed to know any company: superinvestors, institutions, insiders, Congress, and 5% holders. For Nike — the eighteenth Filing Tape audit, after IREN, CoreWeave, Micron, NVIDIA, Tesla, AMD, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, Dell, Bloom Energy, Palantir, Netflix, Starbucks, Broadcom and Verizon — the story is concentration on the long side and a record on the short side: a superinvestor register that is effectively one holder, standing almost still through a falling quarter, while the borrow against the stock climbed to a series high before the earnings print that broke the price.

Lens 1: the superinvestors — seven holders, one of them 94.1%

We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, seven held Nike in long common-stock positions — every reported row is a long position, with no option rows in the count. Their combined position is 15,308,937 shares worth $628,431,858. On a like-for-like pipeline basis the cohort barely moved in the second quarter, falling from 15,595,996 shares across seven holders at March 31 to 15,308,937 shares across the same seven at June 30 — down 1.8% — in a quarter when the share price fell from $52.82 to $41.05 in our price file, down 22.3%. The pipeline and EDGAR-collection second-quarter totals agree exactly, at 15,308,937 shares.

Of the seven holders, none were new, three increased, one was unchanged and three decreased. The register is dominated by a single name to a degree this series has recorded only a few times. The largest holder, Bill Nygren's Oakmark Funds, reported 14,403,570 shares worth $591,266,543, a 0.78% portfolio weight — 94.1% of the entire cohort — and decreased its position 2.5% in the quarter. The other six holders combined hold 905,367 shares, 5.9% of the cohort: Thomas Gayner at Markel is unchanged at 447,400 shares, David Katz at Matrix Asset Advisors increased 68.4% to 223,565 shares, Hillman Capital increased 0.4% to 78,213 shares, Jensen Investment Management decreased 4.8% to 71,344 shares, Mairs & Power decreased 3.2% to 63,845 shares, and Lindsell Train increased 1.0% to 21,000 shares. The top two holders together are 97.0% of the cohort. This is a register that neither arrived nor left in a quarter when the price fell by more than a fifth: it trimmed 1.8%, and almost all of it is one fund.

Nike through six filing lenses
Chart 1: Signal presence by cohort. Superinvestors: 83 managers, 2026Q2 13F (as of Jun 30, 2026). Institutions: full-market 13F aggregation, same date. Insiders: Form 4 record through Oct 2, 2026. Congress: Senate and House PTR record through Oct 3, 2026. 13D/G: filings through Aug 12, 2026. Short interest: FINRA biweekly settlement data through Sep 15, 2026. Source: SEC EDGAR; FINRA; GetCoattail collections.

Lens 2: institutions — fewer filers, 15.41% more shares

Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the register consolidated. At June 30, 2026, 1,745 institutions reported positions in Nike, down from 1,900 at March 31 — an 8.2% fall — and 1,730 of them reported long positions. Reported share counts rose 15.41%, from 827,479,416 to 954,976,446 shares, with 1,366 filers entering and 1,521 exiting. The dataset's reported aggregate value fell 6.1% to $44,644,199,917; the aggregate includes option rows, so we treat filer and share counts as the reliable series and the dollar figure as reported (see methodology). Fewer filers held materially more shares in the same quarter in which the tracked cohort trimmed 1.8% — the same consolidation pattern this series recorded in Verizon.

Lens 3: the 5% register — six filings, all passive, the newest from an active manager's passive arm

Six SC 13D/G filings cover Nike — zero 13D filings and six 13G filings, one of them an amendment, from four reporting names, the most recent filed August 12, 2026. The newest row belongs to Capital World Investors, which filed a new 13G reporting 72,568,069 shares (6.0%) as of June 30, 2026. Vanguard Capital Management reported 89,476,687 shares (7.5%) as of March 31, 2026, in a filing dated April 30. State Street Corporation reported 59,588,679 shares (5.0%) as of March 31, 2026, after 58,049,195 shares (4.9%) as of September 30, 2025 and 59,163,965 shares (5.0%) as of June 30, 2025. The Vanguard Group reported 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026 — the same reporting-name sequence that appeared in our Broadcom, Palantir, Netflix, Starbucks and Verizon audits; we report the rows as filed, without summing them or calling the zero an exit. No 13D — the filing an investor uses when it wants something from management — has appeared at all.

Lens 4: insiders — no purchases in 90 days, but a buying record inside the year

The insider lens is quieter than this series usually finds, but it is not empty. Across the parsed Form 4 record for Nike (107 filings through October 2, 2026), there are 10 open-market purchase transactions totalling 187,930.86 shares and $9,689,626.47, by five buyers — three of them recorded as officer purchases, totalling $3,001,424.77 — against 25 sale transactions totalling 680,381 shares and $46,204,412.84, by nine sellers. Nine of the ten purchases sit inside the most recent year: nine transactions totalling $9,186,870.47 by five buyers, against 13 sales totalling $8,076,476.62 in the same window. In the 90 days through October 2, 2026, however, insiders filed 34 reports covering zero purchases and eight sale transactions totalling 19,441 shares and $771,332.99, by five sellers. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 9, 2026, matches the full-parse 90-day figures exactly — zero purchases, eight sales, $771,332.99, five sellers — so there is no discrepancy to disclose on this lens. Some selling is mechanical — vesting, tax withholding and pre-arranged plans generate filings regardless of anyone's view — and we assign no motives. What the record establishes is a sequence: insiders bought within the last year, in size larger than they sold in that window, and then bought nothing at all in the quarter that ended with the October 1 guidance cut.

Lens 5: Congress — no buys, three sells, House only

Across the Senate and House transaction record we maintain (as of October 3, 2026), Nike shows zero purchase transactions and three sale transactions, with no most-recent purchase recorded. The House aggregate carries all three sales; the Senate aggregate has no Nike row at all. The combined record's member-count field is zero, so we report transaction counts only and do not name a member count for this lens. Congressional disclosures report value ranges rather than exact amounts, so we record direction only. The sample is three transactions, and every one of them is a sale.

Lens 6: short interest — 5.79% of the share count, and a series record

As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent FINRA settlement date — 85,698,150 Nike shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 3.10. That is 5.79% of the 1,479,800,000 shares outstanding in our fundamentals file (a share count as of May 31, 2026). It is also the highest reading in the entire collected series of 137 settlements running from January 15, 2021: the latest value is the peak.

Short interest in Nike
Chart 2: Shares sold short in Nike at each FINRA biweekly settlement, Jan 2024 – Sep 15, 2026 (n = 65 settlements in the chart window; the full collected series runs 137 settlements from Jan 15, 2021). The latest reading, 85,698,150 shares on Sep 15, 2026, is the series peak and is 140.1% above the 35,698,407 shares recorded on Sep 15, 2025. Source: FINRA Equity Short Interest files; GetCoattail collection (nke_short_interest_series.csv).

The recent settlements run 63,943,595 on July 15, then 57,371,605, 68,828,976, 75,594,334 and 85,698,150 — three consecutive increases after July 31, each of them a step toward the record. One timing fact matters for reading this lens: the September 15 settlement predates the October 1 earnings report by more than two weeks. The borrow did not react to the guidance cut; it was already at a record before the guidance existed in public.

The gap, stated plainly

Nike's filing record is a study in registers moving at different speeds. The tracked superinvestors hold 15,308,937 shares across seven managers, and 94.1% of that is a single holder, Oakmark, which decreased 2.5% in a quarter when the price fell 22.3% — no tracked manager opened a position, three increased small ones, and the cohort as a whole trimmed 1.8%. The full market moved the other way on shares: 1,745 filers, down 8.2%, holding 954,976,446 shares, up 15.41% — consolidation in the broad register while the named register stood nearly still. Insiders bought nine times inside the last year, for $9,186,870.47, and then recorded zero purchases in the 90 days through October 2, against $771,332.99 of sales. Congress is three House sales and no buys. And the short side is the loudest lens of the six: 85,698,150 shares sold short at September 15, a series record, up 140.1% year over year, set before the October 1 print reset the price to a 252-session low. One plausible reading is that Nike's second-quarter register already reflected a stock being repositioned — broad holders consolidating, insiders pausing after a year of buying, and borrowers building — while the concentrated value register that dominates the headline count simply held its one large position and waited. 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:

Until one of those prints, the filing record describes a stock whose broad register added 15.41% more shares in the second quarter while its tracked superinvestors trimmed 1.8% at seven holders — one of them holding 94.1% of the cohort — whose insiders bought inside the year but not inside the quarter, and whose short borrow stood at a series record before the guidance cut that took the price to a 252-session low.

Related reading: Seven of 83: One Holder Is 92.2% of the Superinvestors' Verizon Stake. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #17; Thirteen of 83: The Superinvestors Cut Broadcom 57.9% While the Price Rose 22.0% — Filing Tape #16; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. Nike's own page: Nike (NKE) on GetCoattail.

Methodology and data notes

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

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