RESEARCH — THE FILING TAPE #127

Five of 147: Dodge & Cox Holds 57.8% of the Tracked TransUnion Stake. Short Interest Just Hit a Record.

October 19, 2026

GetCoattail Research — The Filing Tape #127. TransUnion surfaced on a trending-stocks screen this week listed as a Moderate Buy with one Buy rating and two Holds, and the filings describe a tracked register that grew into a falling stock: 5 of the 147 superinvestors held the stock at June 30, 2026, totalling 41,836,485 shares, verified against the first quarter for a combined increase of 29.5% among the four holders both register methods could pair, led by a top holder who raised his position 49.5%. Insiders have never bought a share in the parsed record, Congress has no row at all, and short interest just set a series record at 5.91% of the share count.

The Hype

TransUnion's attention this week is a screen story. The stock appeared on TipRanks' Trending Stocks by Analyst screener — SCHW, SMTC and JBHT topped the page's order, followed by covered or skipped names including BNY, USB, CRWV and META — listed as a Moderate Buy with a price target of $93.53 (26.26% upside as printed), 1 Buy, 2 Hold and 0 Sell ratings, a printed one-month change of -0.78%, a market value of $14.19B as printed, in Financial, dated October 16, 2026. TipRanks Our price file shows the path behind the screen: the stock rose 4.3% in the second quarter, from $69.19 on March 31 to $72.14 on June 30, then fell to $63.44 by October 2 — down 12.1% from the June 30 close, down 26.0% year to date, and 27.9% below the 252-session high of $87.97 (December 22, 2025).

The Tape

For TransUnion — the one hundred and twenty-seventh Filing Tape audit — the tape shows five June holders growing a verified 29.5% behind one buyer, a full market shedding filers while adding shares, an insider record with sales and no purchase at all, no Congress row, an all-passive 5% register whose largest print belongs to the same buyer, and a borrow at a series record.

LensAs ofWhat the filings showDirection vs prior period
Superinvestors (13F)Jun 30, 20265 holders of 147 tracked managers hold 41,836,485 shares; top holder is 57.8% of the tracked stake2 INCREASED, 1 UNCHANGED, 2 DECREASED; verified continuing cohort +29.5% vs Q1; no exits; no new holder; no option rows
All institutions (13F)Jun 30, 2026521 filers; 213,079,322 shares; reported value $15,268,702,385Filers -31; shares +9.18%; reported value +17.11%
Insiders (Form 4)Oct 2, 2026Zero purchases in the full parsed record; 51 sales across 151 filingsLast 90 days: 0 purchases, 12 sales; last year: 0 purchases, 34 sales
CongressOct 3, 2026None — no row in the combined, House or Senate aggregatesNo recorded transaction in any aggregate
13D/GAug 13, 202617 parsed filings (0 SC 13D family, 17 SC 13G family); register maximum 12.1%Latest filing Aug 13, 2026 prints Wellington at 3.4%, as of Jun 30, 2026
Short interest (FINRA)Sep 15, 202611,611,777 shares; 5.91% of shares outstanding; 4.91 days to coverSeries record; up 21.55% from the prior settlement; up 14.3% from Jun 30, 2026; up 48.0% from a year ago

Lens 1 — the superinvestors: five June holders, one at 57.8% of the stake, a verified cohort up 29.5%. We track 149 managers whose 13F portfolios we collect from SEC EDGAR — 147 are in the collection (144 at a June 30 period-end, 3 early filers at September 30, none of them holding this name, so there is no period split) — and the June 30, 2026 register for the common stock (CUSIP 89400J107) is 5 distinct managers holding 41,836,485 shares worth $3,018,083,941, long only, with no option rows and no debt rows: 2 are labelled INCREASED, 1 UNCHANGED and 2 DECREASED, with no new holder and no exits. Dodge & Cox Funds is the largest: 24,196,211 shares worth $1,745,514,662 — 57.8% of the tracked stake — at a 0.91% portfolio weight, labelled INCREASED at +49.5% (filed August 13, 2026). The second holder, Independent Franchise Partners, holds 13,976,652 shares (33.4%, INCREASED +15.2%, at a 6.61% weight), so the top two hold 91.2% — 38,172,863 shares — between them. The remaining holders are Vulcan Value Partners (2,707,249 shares, DECREASED -15.6%, at a 5.94% weight), Triple Frond Partners (817,828 shares, UNCHANGED 0.0%, at a 5.27% weight) and Thornburg Investment Management (138,545 shares, DECREASED -8.6%, at a 0.10% weight). The change verifies row by row for four of the five holders under two register methods that agree exactly (methodology): those four held 31,680,465 shares at March 31 and 41,018,657 at June 30 (+9,338,192 shares, +29.5%), with Dodge & Cox alone adding 8,006,700 shares. The fifth holder, Triple Frond Partners, is labelled UNCHANGED at 817,828 shares but could not be paired to a first-quarter filing by either method; the pipeline register reconciles exactly once its unchanged position is counted on both sides (first quarter 32,498,293 shares; second quarter 41,836,485; a register change of +28.7% that differs from the verified cohort's +29.5% only because the unchanged position dilutes it). Every row implies $72.14, the June 30 close. 13F figures are as of June 30, 2026, published up to 45 days later.

TransUnion through six filing lenses
Chart 1: Signal presence by cohort (n = 5 superinvestor holders among 147 managers, at Jun 30, 2026, long only; no option rows; no September 30, 2026 early filer holds this name). Superinvestors: 2026Q2 13F collection, as of Jun 30, 2026. Institutions: full-market 13F aggregation, Jun 30, 2026 (n = 521 filers). Insiders: Form 4 through Oct 2, 2026 (n = 151 filings). Congress: PTR aggregates through Oct 3, 2026 (Senate through Oct 1, 2026) — no row in any aggregate. 13D/G: parsed filings through Aug 13, 2026 (n = 17 filings). Short interest: FINRA settlements through Sep 15, 2026 (n = 137 settlements, symbol TRU only). Source: SEC EDGAR; FINRA; GetCoattail collections.

Lens 2 — institutions: 31 fewer filers reporting 9.18% more shares. At June 30, 2026, 521 institutions reported positions, down 31 from 552 at March 31 (-5.62%); 519 are long. Reported shares rose 9.18%, from 195,157,451 to 213,079,322 (+17,921,871 shares), and reported value rose 17.11% to $15,268,702,385, labelled "reported" because the aggregate includes option rows (methodology). Flow counts agree: 498 entered, 529 exited, net -31, and the by-CUSIP row matches the by-ticker row on every field. The reported value implies $71.66 against a June 30 close of $72.14 (-0.67%).

Lens 3 — insiders: sales only — zero purchases in the entire parsed record. The parsed Form 4 record holds 151 filings through October 2, 2026, and it contains no purchase transaction in any window: the 90-day window, the one-year window and the full record each hold 0 purchases, 0 shares bought and 0 buyers. Sales run the other way, and every one of them is an officer sale. The last 90 days hold 12 sales: 63,947 shares for $5,140,629.67, by 6 sellers, across 24 filings. The one-year window holds 34 sales (121,677 shares, $9,481,258.67, 8 sellers), and the full record holds 51 sales (155,670 shares, $12,563,580.60, 9 sellers). The sales imply $80.39 per share over 90 days, $77.92 over one year and $80.71 over the full record, each inside its window's close range on our price file — so the dollar totals are cited for all three windows.

Lens 4 — Congress: no row in any aggregate. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026), the House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) each carry no row for this name. That absence is itself the finding.

Lens 5 — the 5% register: 17 filings, every one of them passive, maximum 12.1%. Our full parse holds 17 SC 13D/G filings matching the site aggregate — 0 SC 13D family and 17 SC 13G family (6 SC 13G, 11 SC 13G/A); 11 amendments, 11 reporter names across 22 reporter rows. The maximum is 12.1%: Dodge & Cox printed 23,353,165 shares at 12.1% as of May 31, 2026 (filed June 5, 2026, SC 13G/A) — the same buyer as Lens 1, whose 13G prints climb 5.1% (as of December 31, 2025) to 8.4% (as of March 31, 2026) to 12.1% on the way to its 24,196,211-share 13F position. The latest filing (filed August 13, 2026, SC 13G/A) prints the Wellington group at 6,603,464 shares and 3.4% as of June 30, 2026, on three affiliated reporter rows for one position. Massachusetts Financial Services printed six times on a path that ends lower: 19,540,131 shares at 10.0% as of December 31, 2024, rising to 11.1% as of March 31, 2025, then falling through 9.4% as of September 30, 2025, 8.0% as of December 31, 2025 and 6.8% as of March 31, 2026 to 10,667,983 shares at 5.6% as of June 30, 2026. FMR LLC printed 11,634,421.71 shares at 6.0% as of June 30, 2026. Independent Franchise Partners, LLP printed 12,131,944 shares at 6.29% as of March 31, 2026 — exactly its first-quarter 13F share count. Vanguard Capital Management printed 10,332,724 shares at 5.35% as of March 31, 2026, while The Vanguard Group name separately printed 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026.

Lens 6 — short interest: a series record, up 48.0% in a year. The latest FINRA settlement, September 15, 2026, records 11,611,777 shares sold short — 5.91% of the 196,600,000 shares outstanding — at 4.91 days to cover, up 21.55% from the prior settlement (9,552,788 on August 31, 2026). That reading is the maximum across all 137 settlements in the series, which begins January 15, 2021; the minimum is 1,427,246 on August 13, 2021. Against June 30, 2026 (10,160,142) the latest is up 14.3%, and against a year ago (7,843,226 on September 15, 2025) up 48.0%. The recent path runs 10,160,142 (June 30), 10,822,787 (July 15), 8,549,216 (July 31), 8,580,558 (August 14), 9,552,788 (August 31) and 11,611,777 (September 15) — four rises and one fall. The series is published as collected.

Short interest in TransUnion
Chart 2: Shares sold short in TransUnion at each FINRA biweekly settlement, Jan 15, 2021 – Sep 15, 2026 (n = 137 settlements, symbol TRU only; the issuer-name field appears in a single spelling, "TransUnion"). The latest reading, 11,611,777 shares on Sep 15, 2026, is the series maximum: it rose 21.55% on the settlement, sits 14.3% above the Jun 30, 2026 settlement of 10,160,142 and 48.0% above the year-ago settlement of 7,843,226. No single-step ratio in the series reaches 2 times — the largest step is 1.698x — and exactly one step falls to 0.5 times or below (0.472x, May 28, 2021, early in the series); the series is plotted as collected, with no smoothing. Source: FINRA Equity Short Interest files; GetCoattail collection (tru_short_interest_series.csv).

The Gap

The narrative arriving this week is an analyst-consensus story: a Moderate Buy trending listing, one Buy rating against two Holds and no Sell, a printed target above the last close, on a stock down 26.0% year to date. The June tape is more two-sided than most audits in this series. On one side, the tracked money genuinely bought: the verified cohort grew 29.5%, the largest holder added 8,006,700 shares and printed the register's 12.1% maximum in its 13G sequence, and the full market added 9.18% more shares through 31 fewer filers. On the other side, the people inside the company have never bought a share in the parsed record — 51 sales, all by officers — and the borrow has climbed to a series record of 11,611,777 shares, 5.91% of the share count, rising fastest in the same quarter the tracked cohort was buying. Congress is absent entirely. One plausible reading is that the filings describe a transfer, not a consensus: tracked institutions absorbed shares through the second quarter while insiders sold and short sellers built the largest position in the series' history.

What Would Change the Picture

Nothing above is a recommendation. These filings would change it:

Related reading: Three of 147: Oaktree Is 67.8% of the Tracked Expand Energy Stake, and the Verified Cohort Fell 0.4% in a Quarter When the Price Fell 16.9% — Filing Tape #126; Six of 147: Yacktman Is 53.2% of the Tracked Diamondback Stake, and the Verified Cohort Grew 4.2% in a Quarter When the Price Fell 11.1% — Filing Tape #125. TransUnion's own page: TransUnion (TRU) on GetCoattail.

Methodology and data notes

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 19, 2026: first publication.

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