GetCoattail Research — Constellation Brands sells Corona, Modelo and Pacifico in the United States, and its October 6 earnings beat on both lines while its full-year outlook landed below what the Street wanted. Seventeen analysts rated the stock in the three days that followed. The filings describe a register that was already leaving: four of our 83 superinvestors still hold it, Berkshire Hathaway exited its last 632,890 shares in the June quarter, and the tracked cohort cut 16.47% of its shares in a quarter when the price fell 7.3%.
Start with the narrative: the quarter, reported after the close on Tuesday, October 6, was better than expected on its face — comparable earnings of $3.74 per share, up 3% from $3.63 a year earlier and ahead of the $3.60 estimate TipRanks aggregates, on revenue of $2.63 billion that also beat estimates and rose 6.1% year over year, according to Zacks. What the same coverage flagged was the outlook: the company's full-year earnings view fell short of Wall Street expectations. TipRanks counted 17 analyst ratings in the 72 hours to October 9 — third on its trending list, behind Zscaler and Marvell, the two audits this series published immediately before this one — with a Moderate Buy consensus and an average price target of $154.47, implying about 24.9% upside. It was the highest-ranked stock we had not yet audited. Our own price file, which ends October 2, adds a colder context the earnings coverage sits on top of: the last close in the file, $112.87, sits 0.1% above the 252-session closing low of $112.77 set on September 29, and 32.3% below the 252-session closing high of $166.68 set on February 4.
Now the filings. For Constellation Brands — the thirty-fifth Filing Tape audit — the story is a slow register getting slower at the tracked scale: the cohort shrank from seven holders to four, its largest historical name walked away from a position it had already cut by 95% on the 5% register, and the insider record is one of the quietest in this series.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — four holders, 3,786,298 shares, and a Berkshire exit
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 4 held Constellation Brands long — no option rows — totalling 3,786,298 shares worth $526,636,195. The direction count is two decreased and two increased: no new positions, no unchanged rows.
The largest holder is Bill Nygren's Oakmark Funds, at 3,097,056 shares worth $430,769,525, a 0.57% portfolio weight, cut 4.2% in the quarter — and, of a four-name register, 81.8% of the tracked cohort's Constellation shares. Behind it: Richard Pzena's Pzena Investment Management at 599,314 shares worth $83,358,584 (0.24% weight, increased 0.6%), David Katz's Matrix Asset Advisors at 74,277 shares worth $10,331,188 (0.84% weight, increased 60.5%), and Hillman Capital Management at 15,651 shares worth $2,176,898 (1.58% weight, decreased 16.7%). A quarter earlier the pipeline's CUSIP file held seven rows totalling 4,533,061 shares. Three of those rows are gone: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway exited all 632,890 shares (prior reported value $94,933,500), Lee Ainslie's Maverick Capital exited 2,373 shares, and Mason Hawkins's Southeastern Asset Management exited 3,661 shares — each exit appears in the EDGAR collection's exit lists at exactly the share count and prior value of its first-quarter row. The cohort total moved from 4,533,061 to 3,786,298 shares, a change of −16.47%, a difference of −746,763 shares, in a quarter when the price fell from $150.00 at March 31 to $139.09 at June 30, a change of −7.3%. The cohort's reported value implies $139.09 per share, matching the June 30 close exactly. Berkshire's exit alone accounts for 632,890 of the 746,763 shares the cohort shed.
Lens 2: institutions — 1,029 filers, shares up 14.72%
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the quarter looks different. At June 30, 2026, 1,029 institutions reported positions, down one from 1,030 at March 31 (−0.10%), and 1,026 reported long positions. Reported shares rose 14.72%, from 124,313,264 to 142,617,463 shares. Reported aggregate value rose 7.34% to $20,338,030,398; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The implied value per share, $142.61, sits 2.5% above the June 30 close of $139.09. Set the two registers side by side and the contrast is the quarter: filer count essentially flat, reported shares up 18,304,199, while the tracked cohort shed 746,763 shares and lost three of its seven holders — the broad market absorbed shares in size without adding filers, and the tracked names left anyway.
Lens 3: the 5% register — eleven filings, and Berkshire's 13.4 million shares became 632,890
Our full parse holds eleven SC 13D/G filings for Constellation Brands — three SC 13G originals and eight SC 13G/A amendments, ten reporting-person names, the most recent filed May 15, 2026, and no SC 13D originals at all. Six of those names are one group: Warren E. Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., National Indemnity Company, GEICO Corporation, Government Employees Insurance Company and the Precision Castparts Corp. Master Trust co-report the same position, so the register holds five reporting groups. That group's rows run 12,009,000 shares (6.6%) as of March 31, 2025, up to 13,400,000 shares (7.6%) as of September 30, 2025, then down to 632,890 shares (0.4%) as of March 31, 2026 — the register's latest filing, submitted May 15, 2026. Read against Lens 1, the two filings tell one story in two acts: the 13G register shows the Berkshire group cutting 95% of its stake between September and March, and the tracked 13F register then shows the remaining 632,890 shares — the exact share count in both records — gone entirely in the June quarter. The Vanguard Group reported 18,417,534 shares (10.19%) as of March 31, 2025, then 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026 — and a separate Vanguard entity, Vanguard Capital Management, then printed 10,490,856 shares (6.05%) as of March 31, 2026. Capital World Investors printed 12,864,887 shares (7.1%) as of March 31, 2025, then 6,781,286 shares (3.8%) as of September 30, 2025, then 12,494,131 shares (7.2%) as of March 31, 2026. Capital International Investors holds a single row of 4,240,201 shares (2.3%) as of December 31, 2024. We report rows as filed and never sum them: the aggregation's total across these rows would add different dates together, count the Berkshire position six times through its co-reporting, and multiply-count overlapping passive stakes.
Lens 4: insiders — three purchases in the record, none by an officer, none in the last year
The parsed Form 4 record holds 98 filings through October 2, 2026. Across it, open-market purchases total 3 transactions — 3,000 shares, $527,276.10, two buyers — and none of the three is recorded as an officer purchase. Against that stand 5 sales totalling 10,933 shares and $1,757,083.81, by three sellers, four of them recorded as officer sales. The last year holds zero purchases against 3 sales of 6,962 shares for $1,024,433.81 by three sellers, two of them recorded as officer sales. The last 90 days are quieter still: across 23 filings there is not one open-market purchase and not one open-market sale — no P-code and no S-code transactions at all. One sourcing note deserves its own sentence rather than a footnote: our site's insider aggregate carries no Constellation Brands row at all, so unlike several earlier audits there is no second aggregate to cross-check here; every insider figure in this audit comes from the full parse alone, and we say so rather than implying a match. We assign no motives to any of it; the record's shape is the fact — this is a small, two-sided register that has printed nothing at all for a quarter.
Lens 5: Congress — two sales, no purchases, House only
Across the congressional record we maintain (combined record as of October 3, 2026), Constellation Brands shows 0 purchase transactions and 2 sale transactions, with no purchase on record. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the identical record — both sales are House rows. The Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Constellation Brands record. The combined aggregate records a member count of zero alongside those two sales, so this audit cites transaction counts only and makes no claim about how many members traded. Congressional disclosures report value ranges rather than exact amounts, so this lens records direction and counts only. It is a two-transaction register: sales only, one chamber only.
Lens 6: short interest — 8,516,727 shares, up 12.5% since the June settlement
As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent FINRA settlement date — 8,516,727 Constellation Brands shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 3.44, up 4.17% from the prior settlement. The full-series peak is recent: 10,918,197 shares on October 31, 2025, so the latest reading sits 22.0% below the peak. Year over year the borrow is nearly unchanged, up 4.0% from 8,185,499 shares on September 15, 2025, but since the June 30 settlement (7,572,909 shares) it is up 12.5% — the borrow rebuilt over the same summer the price fell 18.9% from its June 30 close. Our fundamentals file carries no share count for this name (see methodology), so we do not express the borrow as a percentage of shares outstanding rather than estimating one.
The recent settlements run 8,254,203 on July 15, then 9,178,065, 7,391,267, 8,176,016 and 8,516,727 — a borrow oscillating in a band it has occupied for a year. The series began at 3,149,911 shares on January 15, 2021; its lowest reading, 1,186,460 shares, came on October 31, 2023. What changed in 2026 is not the level so much as the direction since June: up 12.5% across five settlements while the closing price fell from $139.09 to $112.87.
The gap, stated plainly
The registers describe a company whose October earnings beat arrived after its tracked ownership had already thinned. The tracked superinvestors held 3,786,298 shares at June 30 — four holders, one of them 81.8% of the total — having cut 16.47% in a quarter when the price fell 7.3%, with Berkshire Hathaway's exit of 632,890 shares accounting for most of the shares shed. The full market moved the other way on shares, up 18,304,199 to 142,617,463, on an unchanged filer count of about a thousand. The 5% register printed eleven filings: the Berkshire group fell from 13,400,000 shares (7.6%) to 632,890 (0.4%) before its 13F exit, one Vanguard row went to zero and another appeared, and Capital World's stake halved and then roughly doubled back. Insiders bought three times in the parsed record — $527,276.10 in total, none of it by an officer, none of it in the last year — against $1,757,083.81 of sales, and printed no open-market transaction at all in the last 90 days. Congress registers two sales and no purchases, all in the House. And the borrow, at 8,516,727 shares, is up 12.5% since the June settlement and almost exactly where it sat a year ago. One plausible reading is that the registers are sorted by mandate and by clock: the tracked managers and the largest 5% holder spent a year reducing a position the broad benchmark market kept absorbing, insiders and Congress barely trade this name at all, and the October story belongs to none of them yet, because none of these filings can see October. 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 3,786,298 shares at June 30 across four holders, with Oakmark at 81.8%. Whether Oakmark's 3,097,056-share row grows, holds or follows Berkshire out is the whole lens.
- 2. A first insider transaction of either kind in 90 days. The parsed record holds zero open-market purchases and zero sales in the last 90 days, and zero purchases in the last year. Any P-code print — one buyer, any size — would break a year without a purchase; any S-code print would end a quarter of complete quiet.
- 3. Whether the full market's share growth holds. The broad register added 18,304,199 reported shares in the June quarter on a flat filer count while the price fell 7.3%. A second such quarter would widen the split this audit is built on; a reversal would close it.
- 4. Whether Capital World's round trip repeats. The register's most active passive holder went 7.1% to 3.8% to 7.2% across three prints. The next 13G/A row shows whether that was rotation or noise.
- 5. A Senate first print, or a first congressional purchase. The congressional register holds two House sales, no purchases and no Senate record. Any Senate row, or a first purchase in either chamber, would change this lens's one-directional shape.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by four of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 3,786,298 shares after a 16.47% one-quarter cut and a complete Berkshire Hathaway exit — whose full market added 14.7% more reported shares in the same quarter, whose insiders have bought $527,276.10 against $1,757,083.81 of sales with no transaction at all in 90 days, whose congressional register shows two sales and no purchases, and whose borrow has rebuilt 12.5% since June while the price fell to the edge of its 252-session low.
Related reading: One of 83: The Superinvestors Cut Marvell 99.7% in the Quarter It Tripled — Filing Tape #34; One of 83: The Superinvestors Cut Zscaler 90.6% in One Quarter. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #33; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. Constellation Brands' own page: Constellation Brands, Inc. (STZ) 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; Constellation Brands identified by CUSIP 21036P108. Four distinct managers hold long positions totalling 3,786,298 shares; all four reported rows are long (no put or call rows); directions are two decreased and two increased, with no new or unchanged rows. Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (4,533,061 shares at March 31 across seven filing rows; 3,786,298 shares at June 30 across four filing rows; change −16.47%) 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), so no collection difference needs reporting for this name. The three exited rows (Warren Buffett - Berkshire Hathaway, 632,890 shares, prior reported value $94,933,500; Lee Ainslie - Maverick Capital, 2,373 shares, $355,950; Mason Hawkins - Southeastern Asset Management, 3,661 shares, $549,150) appear in the EDGAR collection's exit lists, and each matches its first-quarter pipeline row in shares and value exactly. Two first-quarter rows carry no manager name in the pipeline file; we attribute the 18,795-share row to Hillman Capital Management and the 46,280-share row to Matrix Asset Advisors by change continuity (their second-quarter rows print −16.7% and +60.5% respectively against exactly those bases), and we do not rely on those attributions for any headline figure. Oakmark's share of the cohort is 81.8% = 3,097,056 / 3,786,298.
- 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; 1,026 of the 1,029 reported long positions), and its figures match the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for 21036P108 exactly on holders, shares, reported value, prior holders and prior reported value. The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (917 and 918, a net of −1 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 ($20,338,030,398 over 142,617,463 shares) implies ≈$142.61 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $139.09 in our price file, a gap of +2.5%. 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 (98 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 3 across the parsed record (3,000 shares, $527,276.10, two buyers), none of them recorded as officer purchases. Sale transactions total 5 across the record (10,933 shares, $1,757,083.81, three sellers), four of them recorded as officer sales. In the year through October 2, 2026: zero purchases and 3 sales (6,962 shares, $1,024,433.81, three sellers, two of them recorded as officer sales). In the 90 days through October 2, 2026: zero purchases and zero sales across 23 filings. The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 10, 2026) carries no Constellation Brands row, so no site-versus-parse comparison exists for this name and none is implied; all insider figures here are from the full parse. "No purchases in the last year" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 98 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G aggregation and parsed filings (11 filings matching CUSIP 21036P108 and issuer CIK 16918, ten reporting-person names in aggregate — five reporting groups, because Warren E. Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., National Indemnity Company, GEICO Corporation, Government Employees Insurance Company and the Precision Castparts Corp. Master Trust co-report the same position: 3 SC 13G originals and 8 SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through May 15, 2026. The Berkshire group's rows (12,009,000 shares at 6.6% as of March 31, 2025; 13,400,000 shares at 7.6% as of September 30, 2025; 632,890 shares at 0.4% as of March 31, 2026, filed May 15, 2026), The Vanguard Group's rows (15,534,562 shares at 8.55% as of December 31, 2024; 18,417,534 shares at 10.19% as of March 31, 2025; 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 26, 2026), Vanguard Capital Management's row (10,490,856 shares at 6.05% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 29, 2026), Capital World Investors' rows (12,864,887 shares at 7.1% as of March 31, 2025; 6,781,286 shares at 3.8% as of September 30, 2025; 12,494,131 shares at 7.2% as of March 31, 2026, filed May 14, 2026) and Capital International Investors' row (4,240,201 shares at 2.3% as of December 31, 2024) are reported as filed. No rows are summed, because the aggregation's totalSharesReported field (209,432,907 shares) adds different dates together, counts the co-reported Berkshire position six times and would multiply-count single positions. 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 — 0 purchase transactions, 2 sale transactions, no purchase on record. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the identical record; the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Constellation Brands record, and we report that absence rather than omitting the chamber. The combined aggregate's member-count field reads zero alongside the two sales, so this audit reports transaction counts only. 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 Constellation Brands series covers 137 settlements from January 15, 2021 to September 15, 2026. The maximum of the full collected series is 10,918,197 shares on October 31, 2025 — inside the chart window — so the latest reading of 8,516,727 shares on September 15, 2026 sits 22.0% below the peak ((8,516,727 / 10,918,197) − 1) and 4.0% above the September 15, 2025 reading of 8,185,499; the change from the prior settlement (8,176,016 shares on August 31, 2026) is +4.17%, and the change since the June 30, 2026 settlement (7,572,909 shares) is +12.5%. The latest row's prior-settlement field (8,176,016) matches the prior settlement file's reported figure exactly. Two older rows in FINRA's own files carry prior-settlement fields that differ slightly from the preceding settlement's reported figure (April 15, 2021 and June 15, 2021); our published series reproduces the source files as distributed, and no figure in this audit depends on those two fields. The series minimum is 1,186,460 shares on October 31, 2023; its first reading was 3,149,911 shares on January 15, 2021. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact. No share-count ratio is given, because our fundamentals file carries no shares-outstanding figure for this name (see below).
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries Constellation Brands' revenue of $9,139,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026, its net income of $1,686,700,000 labelled fiscal 2026, and its assets of $21,900,500,000 labelled fiscal 2026 — all three fields carry the same fiscal year in the file. The file is marked partial for this name: it carries no shares-outstanding figure and no market value, because no structured shares fact for the company passed the file's recency guard. The file's price for the name is $115.67 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $112.87, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for Constellation Brands through October 2, 2026 ($112.87 close, −18.2% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $166.68 on February 4, 2026; 252-session closing low $112.77 on September 29, 2026; closes of $150.00 at March 31, 2026 and $139.09 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of −7.3%; change from June 30 to October 2 of −18.9% ((112.87 / 139.09) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is −32.3%, and the latest close sits +0.1% above the 252-session closing low ((112.87 / 112.77) − 1).
- Market context sources: the fiscal second-quarter results reported October 6, 2026 (comparable EPS of $3.74, up 3% from $3.63 a year earlier, ahead of a $3.60 aggregate estimate; full-year earnings outlook below Wall Street expectations; 17 analyst ratings in the 72 hours to October 9, 2026; Moderate Buy consensus; average price target of $154.47 implying about 24.9% upside; Constellation Brands third on the trending list behind Zscaler and Marvell) — TipRanks' October 9, 2026 trending-stocks report, checked October 11, 2026, summarised in our own words; quarterly revenue of $2.63 billion, above estimates and up 6.1% year over year, and an EPS comparison against a $3.62 consensus — Zacks' October 6, 2026 earnings coverage, checked October 11, 2026. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- Constellation Brands is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Constellation Brands, Inc. (STZ) stock page. Series data: stz_lens_data.csv · stz_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: Marvell · Zscaler · 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.