GetCoattail Research — UnitedHealth Group is the largest U.S. health insurer, reporting third-quarter results before the open on Tuesday, October 13, 2026 — the print the recovery narrative has to survive — after a second quarter that beat consensus and raised full-year guidance. The filings describe a register that leaned the other way in that second quarter: seventeen tracked superinvestors hold it, nine of them cut, the cohort total fell 11.82% while the price rose 53.6% and the full market added 124,292,604 reported shares, insiders recorded no purchases in the last year against six older purchases in the parsed record, Congress records three purchases against five sales, and the borrow stands 32.3% below a peak it set in April 2026.
Start with the narrative. UnitedHealth reports third-quarter 2026 results before the market opens on Tuesday, October 13, with a conference call at 8:00 a.m. ET — a date the company flagged in September — and the print is the first full test of a recovery story built during 2026 after a difficult 2025 of elevated medical costs. The consensus bar, as aggregated in the previews, sits near $4.12 to $4.15 of earnings per share on roughly $111.31 billion of revenue. The bar is set where it is because the second quarter was strong: on July 16, the company posted adjusted earnings of $6.38 a share against a $4.94 consensus, with revenue of $112.03 billion, and raised its full-year 2026 guidance to between $19.50 and $20.00 a share. A MarketBeat count on September 18 put the analyst consensus at Moderate Buy with an average target of $456.56. The stock itself comes into the print well off its summer levels: our own price file — which ends October 2 — closes UNH at $371.90, down 14.8% from its 252-session closing high of $436.35 set on July 21, 2026, up 12.7% year to date, and up 43.6% from its 252-session closing low of $259.02 set on March 27, 2026. Press reports put the 52-week range at $255.96 to $461.62 and the market value near $340 billion. MarketBeat's October 12 list of healthcare stocks to watch — ranked on recent dollar trading volume — placed UnitedHealth third among three names. The next scheduled test after the print is not a filing at all; it is whether the registers below move when the third-quarter 13F season closes in mid-November.
Now the filings. For UNH — the fifty-seventh Filing Tape audit — the tape shows a seventeen-name tracked cohort whose centre of gravity is a single holder, a broad register that added filers and shares over the same quarter, a 5% register of four passive-complex filings, an insider record whose purchases are all older than a year, a congressional record that bought as well as sold, and a borrow that peaked in April of this year and has been falling since.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — seventeen holders, nine of them cutting
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 17 held UNH long — no option rows — totalling 13,155,341 shares worth $5,467,811,343. The direction count, on the collection's own labels, is nine decreases, six increases and two new positions — and the collection's exit list holds three UNH rows: David Tepper - Appaloosa Management (90,000 shares at March 31), Thomas Gayner - Markel Group (18,700 shares) and Steven Check - Check Capital Management (1,232 shares). The cohort total moved from 14,917,893 shares at March 31, across 18 filing rows, to 13,155,341 at June 30, across 17 rows, a change of -11.82%, a difference of -1,762,552 shares.
The register's centre of gravity is one holder. Dodge & Cox Funds holds 9,072,258 shares worth $3,770,702,593, a 1.97% portfolio weight — 69.0% of the tracked cohort's UNH shares — flagged decreased by 4.2%, and here the label and the filing continuity agree: the pipeline's March 31 file already carries the position at 9,466,756 shares, so the position shrank in the quarter rather than appearing in it. In fact every one of the fifteen continuing holders' labels agrees with its continuity change this quarter (see methodology). Strip Dodge & Cox out and the rest of the cohort fell from 5,451,137 shares to 4,083,083 — -25.1% — in the quarter the price rose 53.6%. The next-largest holder, Christopher Davis - Davis Advisors, holds 1,274,650 shares worth $529,839,298, increased 2.2%. Ruane Cunniff LP holds 705,554 shares worth $293,249,409, decreased 3.1%. Mairs & Power Funds holds 559,951 shares worth $232,732,484, decreased 24.4%, and Samantha McLemore - Patient Capital Management holds 437,773 shares worth $181,951,987, increased 0.1%. Below them: Duan Yongping - H&H International Investment (399,600 shares, decreased 33.6%), Chase Coleman - Tiger Global Management (297,452 shares, decreased 15.1%), Yacktman Asset Management (171,768 shares, increased 2.0%), Sarah Ketterer - Causeway Capital Management (87,447 shares, increased 21.7%), Vulcan Value Partners (67,309 shares, decreased 92.6%), First Eagle Investment Management (42,364 shares, increased 3.8%), Arnold Van Den Berg - Century Management (27,680 shares, decreased 4.2%), Hillman Capital Management (5,405 shares, decreased 27.0%), Tweedy Browne (4,089 shares, increased 11.5%), Jensen Investment Management (859 shares, decreased 42.4%), Torray Funds (683 shares, new) and Glenn Greenberg - Brave Warrior Advisors (499 shares, new). The cohort's implied price, $415.63 per share, sits exactly on the June 30 close of $415.63. The price rose from $270.59 at March 31 to $415.63 at June 30, a change of +53.6% — this register held 11.82% fewer shares at the end of that rise than at the start of it, and outside its largest holder it held 25.1% fewer.
Lens 2: institutions — 384 more filers, 124.3 million more shares
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the register grew on both counts, in the opposite direction from the tracked cohort. At June 30, 2026, 3,391 institutions reported positions, up 384 from 3,007 at March 31 (+12.77%), and 3,373 of them reported long positions. Reported shares rose 18.97%, from 655,117,006 to 779,409,610 shares — 124,292,604 more shares than the prior quarter. Reported aggregate value rose 75.65% to $336,840,926,244; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). Here the implied value per share, $432.17, sits 4.0% above the June 30 close of $415.63 — a gap, printed as found, and one more reason to headline the share count rather than the dollars: the value increase mostly restates the quarter's price move, while the share count rose 18.97% and the filer count rose by 384 in the same quarter in which the tracked cohort cut 11.82% — and cut 25.1% outside its largest holder.
Lens 3: the 5% register — four filings, all passive-complex paper
Our full parse holds four SC 13D/G filings for UNH — two SC 13G filings and two SC 13G/A amendments, and no SC 13D of any kind in the parsed set, four reporting-person rows across three names, the most recent filed August 7, 2026. The register's maximum is an older row: in an SC 13G/A filed May 7, 2025, The Vanguard Group prints 91,802,960 shares (10.08%) as of April 30, 2025. The same complex then re-papered, as this series keeps meeting: in an SC 13G/A filed March 27, 2026, The Vanguard Group prints 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026, and in an SC 13G filed April 30, 2026, Vanguard Capital Management prints 68,122,483 shares (7.5%) as of March 31, 2026. The newest row is a second passive complex: in an SC 13G filed August 7, 2026, STATE STREET CORPORATION prints 45,684,412 shares (5.0%) as of June 30, 2026. That is the whole 5% register in our parsed coverage: four filings, all index-complex paper, and no activist paper at all. Read as filed — the rows are reported exactly as filed, never summed — the register describes passive complexes holding and re-papering large stakes, and nothing else.
Lens 4: insiders — six purchases in the record, none of them in the last year
The parsed Form 4 record holds 223 filings through October 2, 2026. Across the whole record, open-market purchases total 6 transactions, totalling 110,408 shares and $32,119,275.31, by five buyers, two of the transactions recorded as officer purchases worth $30,018,938.02 — while sales total 5 transactions, totalling 3,085 shares and $1,134,168.35, by two sellers. But every one of those purchases is old: the last year holds 120 filings and no purchases at all, against 3 sales totalling 2,469 shares and $944,910.00 by a single seller. The last 90 days hold 27 filings, no purchases, and 2 sales totalling 1,669 shares and $660,910.00 by a single seller. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 12 over its 90-day window, prints the same 90-day line exactly — 0 purchases, 2 sales, $660,910.00 — so the two collections agree here. We assign no motives to any of it; a tape whose buying stopped more than a year ago, while small sales continued, is the fact.
Lens 5: Congress — three purchases against five sales
The congressional record we maintain is mixed for this name, which is not the usual shape in this series. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026) carries a UNH row printing 3 purchases and 5 sales, across three members, with the most recent purchase dated June 4, 2026. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) prints 2 purchases and 5 sales across two members, its most recent purchase dated April 22, 2026, and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) prints 1 purchase and no sales for one member, dated June 4, 2026 — the two chambers sum to the combined line exactly. So this lens is two-directional: five recorded sales and three recorded purchases across the Senate and House records as this site maintains them, with the buying side of the tape more recent than most of the selling.
Lens 6: short interest — 13,216,124 shares, and a peak set this April
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 137 settlements, from January 15, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 13,216,124 UNH shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 2.47. The latest step was down sharply: the reading fell 13.55% from the prior settlement's 15,287,263 shares on August 31, 2026. Unlike the previous audit in this series, the top of this series is recent: the peak is 19,516,586 shares on April 30, 2026, a fact we verified by taking the maximum across the whole series, and the latest reading sits 32.3% below it — this borrow set its record five months ago and has been falling, unevenly, since. Against September 15, 2025 the latest reading is down 7.2% from 14,238,970 shares. Against the fundamentals file's 897,594,847 shares outstanding, that is 1.47% of the share count. The June 30, 2026 settlement — the date the 13F lenses snapshot — printed 18,410,503 shares, well above the present. The recent settlements run 17,338,297 on July 15, then 15,085,300, a one-step rebound to 15,461,857 on August 14, then 15,287,263 and 13,216,124 — lower than where the summer began, though not in a straight line. The series minimum is 4,152,140 shares on August 31, 2022; the series' own first settlement, on January 15, 2021, printed 6,215,303 shares — below the latest reading.
The borrow peaked in April 2026, before the second-quarter print that powered the recovery narrative — and it has been falling, unevenly, ever since.
The gap, stated plainly
The narrative describes the largest U.S. health insurer walking into the print its recovery story has to survive: a consensus near $4.12 to $4.15 a share on roughly $111.31 billion of revenue, a second quarter that had just beaten by $1.44 a share and raised full-year guidance to between $19.50 and $20.00, a Moderate Buy consensus averaging $456.56 — and a stock down 14.8% from its July closing high into the report. The tracked superinvestors held 13,155,341 shares at June 30 across seventeen holders, having cut 11.82% in a quarter when the price rose 53.6%, with nine decreases, six increases, two new positions, three exits, and Dodge & Cox Funds at 69.0% of the cohort — outside which the cohort cut 25.1%. The full market moved the other way: 779,409,610 reported shares, up 124,292,604, across 3,391 filers — 384 more than the prior quarter. The 5% register printed four filings, all passive-complex paper: The Vanguard Group at 10.08% on an April 2025 date and at zero on a March 2026 date, Vanguard Capital Management at 7.5% on the March register, and State Street at 5.0% on the June register. Insiders, across 223 parsed filings, recorded six purchases totalling $32,119,275.31 — every one of them more than a year old — against five sales, with no purchase at all in the last year or the last 90 days. Congress records three purchases and five sales, split two House purchases and one Senate purchase against five House sales. And the borrow stands at 13,216,124 shares — down 7.2% year over year and 32.3% below the series record it set on April 30, 2026, at 2.47 days to cover and 1.47% of the share count. One plausible reading is that the registers are describing different UNH stories on different clocks: the broad register spent the second quarter adding filers and shares into a rising price, the tracked cohort spent it trimming almost everywhere except a handful of increasers, the insider tape's buying is entirely historical while its recent tape is sales-only, the congressional tape bought as recently as June, and short sellers built their largest borrow of this series in April 2026 and have spent five months unwinding it — all of it snapshot at June 30 or earlier, before the third-quarter print that makes this week's story existed as news. 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 13,155,341 shares, taken months before the October print.
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 13,155,341 shares at June 30 across seventeen holders, after a -11.82% move built from nine decreases and three exits. Whether Dodge & Cox Funds' 9,072,258 shares — 69.0% of the cohort — shrink again, and whether the other sixteen holders' combined 4,083,083 shares fall for a second straight quarter, are the first things the next register will answer.
- 2. A first insider purchase in over a year. The parsed record holds 6 purchase transactions against 5 sales, but no purchase in the last year or the last 90 days. A single new open-market purchase would restart a tape that has been sales-only for a year; another quarter of sales-only filings would extend the gap.
- 3. More congressional buying, or its end. The combined congressional record prints 3 purchases and 5 sales (House 2 purchases and 5 sales, Senate 1 purchase), with the latest purchase on June 4, 2026. Further purchases in either chamber's aggregate would extend the mixed picture; a return to sales-only prints would close it.
- 4. An original SC 13D, or a 13G from outside the passive complexes. The 5% register in our parsed coverage holds four filings, all of them Vanguard-complex or State Street paper. A first 13D in the parsed set — any filer declaring an active stake — would change this lens from passive holdings into something else.
- 5. Whether the borrow keeps falling from its April record. Short interest stands at 13,216,124 shares, down 7.2% in a year and 32.3% below the April 30, 2026 series record of 19,516,586. The settlements that will print the earnings week have not been published yet: a reading back above the April record would restart the build, and continued declines would extend a five-month unwind.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by seventeen of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 13,155,341 shares, cut 11.82% in the quarter its price rose 53.6% and cut 25.1% outside its largest holder — whose full market added 124,292,604 reported shares and 384 filers, whose insiders have recorded no purchase in the last year against six older purchases, whose congressional register records three purchases and five sales, and whose borrow has fallen 32.3% from the series record it set in April 2026 — all of it snapshot at June 30, before the earnings print the recovery story has to survive.
Related reading: Fifteen of 83: Ten Superinvestors Cut JPMorgan in Q2. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #56; Two of 83: Both Superinvestors Cut Humana as the Price Rose 129.1% in Q2 — Filing Tape #55; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. UNH's own page: UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH) 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; UNH identified by CUSIP 91324P102. Seventeen distinct managers hold long positions totalling 13,155,341 shares; all seventeen reported rows are long (no put or call rows); the direction count on the collection's labels is nine decreased, six increased and two new, and the collection's exit list contains three UNH rows (David Tepper - Appaloosa Management, 90,000 shares at March 31, $24,353,100; Thomas Gayner - Markel Group, 18,700 shares, $5,060,034; Steven Check - Check Capital Management, 1,232 shares, $333,367 — the Check row carries the lowercase CUSIP spelling in the pipeline files). Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (14,917,893 shares at March 31 across 18 filing rows; 13,155,341 shares at June 30 across 17 filing rows; change -11.82%) 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 filing continuity across the two pipeline files: for all fifteen continuing holders they agree with the EDGAR collection's own percentage labels, and the two rows labelled new (Torray Funds, 683 shares; Glenn Greenberg - Brave Warrior Advisors, 499 shares) have no row in the March 31 file. This audit computes the cohort's ex-largest-holder change on the continuity basis (5,451,137 shares at March 31 — the cohort total less Dodge & Cox Funds' 9,466,756 shares, including the three exited positions — to 4,083,083 at June 30, -25.1%). Dodge & Cox Funds' share of the cohort is 69.0% = 9,072,258 / 13,155,341.
- 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; 3,373 reported long positions out of 3,391 filers). UNH reports under two CUSIP spellings, 91324P102 and 91324p102, and the by-ticker row sums both. The backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP file carries the uppercase spelling as a row (3,366 filers; 777,872,730 shares; $336,226,459,310 reported); the difference to the by-ticker totals (25 filers; 1,536,880 shares; $614,466,934 reported) is the lowercase-spelling bucket, and the cross-check matches once both spellings are counted. (The pipeline's own superinvestor files show the same split: one tracked filer's exit row carries the lowercase spelling.) The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (2,177 and 1,793, a net of +384 that matches the change in holder count) are gross flows, so this audit headlines the net change. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($336,840,926,244 over 779,409,610 shares) implies $432.17 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $415.63 in our price file, a gap of +4.0% — printed here as found. 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 (223 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 6 across the parsed record (110,408 shares, $32,119,275.31, five buyers, two of them recorded as officer purchases worth $30,018,938.02) — and zero in the last year (120 filings) and in the 90-day window (27 filings). Sale transactions total 5 across the record (3,085 shares, $1,134,168.35, two sellers, four of them recorded as officer sales); the last year holds 3 (2,469 shares, $944,910.00, one seller) and the 90-day window holds 2 (1,669 shares, $660,910.00, one seller, both recorded as officer sales). The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 12, 2026, 90-day window) prints the same 90-day line exactly, so the two collections agree for this name. Because the one-year window prints zero purchases while the full record prints six, every purchase in this parsed record predates the one-year window; "purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 223 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G parsed filings (4 filings matching issuer CIK 731766 on CUSIP 91324P102, 4 reporting-person rows across 3 names: two SC 13G filings and two SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through August 7, 2026. The site aggregation's by-ticker file carries the same totals (4 filings, 3 reporters, latest filing August 7, 2026, maximum 10.08%, total reported 205,609,855 shares), so the aggregate and the parse agree here. The Vanguard Group's rows (91,802,960 shares at 10.08% as of April 30, 2025, filed May 7, 2025, SC 13G/A; and 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026, SC 13G/A), Vanguard Capital Management's row (68,122,483 shares at 7.5% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 30, 2026, SC 13G) and STATE STREET CORPORATION's row (45,684,412 shares at 5.0% as of June 30, 2026, filed August 7, 2026, SC 13G) are reported as filed, under the reporting-person names exactly as they appear. No rows are summed in the article, because aggregation totals across these rows would add different dates together. No reason for any change is asserted — the filings themselves are the record. The parsed coverage for this issuer holds these four filings; a 5% holder that has not filed in the covered window would not appear here.
- Congress lens: Senate PTR archive and House PTR archive as maintained on this site. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026) prints 3 purchases and 5 sales for UNH, across three members, with the most recent purchase on June 4, 2026; the House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) prints 2 purchases and 5 sales across two members, most recent purchase April 22, 2026; and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) prints 1 purchase and no sales for one member, most recent purchase June 4, 2026 — the chambers sum to the combined line on both sides (2 + 1 purchases; 5 + 0 sales), and the member counts sum as well (2 + 1 = 3).
- 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 (6,215,303 shares) to September 15, 2026. The latest reading is 13,216,124 shares on September 15, 2026, which sits 32.3% below the series maximum of 19,516,586 shares on April 30, 2026 (verified by a maximum query over the series, not read off the latest row), down 7.2% from the September 15, 2025 reading of 14,238,970 and down 13.55% from the prior settlement (15,287,263 on August 31, 2026). The series minimum is 4,152,140 shares on August 31, 2022. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact, so the October 13, 2026 earnings print is not yet in this series. The share-count ratio (1.47%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries UNH's revenue of $447,567,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, its net income of $12,056,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, and its assets of $309,581,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 897,594,847 (as of July 31, 2026 in the file, sourced in the file to the issuer's reported shares-outstanding figure) and a file-computed market value of $337,782,899,397.22. The file's price for the name is $376.32 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $371.90, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for UNH through October 2, 2026 ($371.90 close, +12.7% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $436.35 on July 21, 2026; 252-session closing low $259.02 on March 27, 2026; closes of $270.59 at March 31, 2026 and $415.63 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of +53.6%; change from June 30 to October 2 of -10.5% ((371.90 / 415.63) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -14.8%, the gain from the 252-session closing low is +43.6%, and the series in our price file begins June 1, 2021. The earnings-week price context is outside this file and is cited from press reports only, as stated in the text.
- Market context sources: MarketBeat, Healthcare Stocks To Watch Today — October 12th (October 12, 2026; three healthcare names ranked on recent dollar trading volume — Moderna, Medtronic and UnitedHealth Group — as published by American Banking News, checked October 13, 2026); the third-quarter report date (before the open on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, call at 8:00 a.m. ET — the company's notice as reported by multiple outlets in October 2026); the consensus detail (earnings of about $4.12 to $4.15 a share on revenue of about $111.31 billion — earnings previews aggregated by MarketBeat and regional MarketBeat mirrors, October 2026); the second-quarter results (released July 16, 2026; adjusted earnings $6.38 a share against a $4.94 consensus; revenue $112.03 billion, up 0.4% year over year; full-year 2026 guidance raised to $19.50–$20.00 a share — as reported by multiple outlets); the analyst consensus (Moderate Buy, average target $456.56 — MarketBeat data as reported September 18, 2026); the 52-week range ($255.96 to $461.62) and market value near $340 billion (press reports, October 2026). Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- UNH is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH) stock page. Series data: unh_lens_data.csv · unh_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: JPMorgan Chase · Humana · 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 13, 2026: first publication.