GetCoattail Research — UPS is the delivery company that spent a week in the headlines for the wrong kind of delivery — a missed warning email that sent stealth-fighter parts through Hong Kong — in the same week it staffed up for the holiday peak. The filings describe a register that grew on every long lens in the second quarter: seven tracked superinvestors hold it, one of them is 78.8% of the cohort, the full market added 95,790,135 reported shares, insiders have recorded no purchase in a year against three sales, and in August the borrow set a record for the whole series we hold.
Start with the narrative. On Wednesday, October 7, 2026, Bloomberg News reported that sensitive components from Lockheed Martin's F-35 stealth fighter — a cockpit canopy and a weapons-bay door, both coated in radar-absorbing material — had ended up in the hands of Chinese authorities after a UPS employee missed a warning that the shipment was barred from certain countries under U.S. arms-export rules. The parts were travelling from Australia to San Francisco for possible repair or disposal; after a delay leaving Australia, the shipment was rerouted through Hong Kong to save time, and the warning — sent by email from freight forwarder DSV, working for Lockheed Martin — may have arrived through a different system from the one the employee was using. Pentagon officials had briefed congressional staff on the episode on September 29, the Pentagon and the State Department are investigating, and UPS shares gave back earlier gains and traded down less than 1% after the report. The same day brought the ordinary peak-season announcement: 100,000 seasonal hires across hundreds of U.S. locations — down from 125,000 in 2024, as the company cuts up to 30,000 operational jobs while it shrinks low-margin Amazon volume — and more than 4 billion RFID-tracked packages expected by the end of 2026. Underneath both stories sits a beat-and-raise quarter: on July 28, UPS posted second-quarter revenue of $22.83 billion, up 7.6%, with adjusted earnings of $1.76 a share against a consensus near $1.65, and lifted its full-year outlook to about $91.2 billion of revenue and about $7.22 of adjusted earnings — while reported GAAP earnings were $0.71 a share. Analysts sat split above the price: a MarketBeat count on October 9 put the consensus at Hold across 26 analysts, with an average target of $115.87; the same week, Truist cut its target from $130 to $115 and Citi cut its from $132 to $122, both keeping Buy ratings. Our own price file, which ends October 2, closes UPS at $93.02 — down 22.5% from its 252-session closing high of $120.00 set on February 11, 2026, and down 6.2% year to date. The next scheduled test is the third-quarter report on October 27.
Now the filings. For UPS — the fifty-fourth Filing Tape audit — the tape shows a tracked cohort that added through a rising second quarter behind a single dominant holder, a broad register that added even faster, an insider record whose purchases are all more than a year old while its sales are all inside the year, and a borrow that printed its series record in August, weeks before the F-35 story existed as news.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — seven holders, one of them 78.8%, and an 8.89% add
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 7 held UPS long — no option rows — totalling 1,017,583 shares worth $109,390,172. The direction count, on the collection's own labels, is one new position, three increases, two decreases and one unchanged, and the collection's exit list holds one UPS row: Lee Ainslie - Maverick Capital, out after holding 6,900 shares in the first quarter. The cohort total moved from 934,525 shares at March 31, across seven filing rows, to 1,017,583 at June 30, also across seven rows, a change of +8.89%, a difference of +83,058 shares — the same row count with a different register inside it, because the quarter's exit and the quarter's new position offset each other in the count.
Most of that register is one name. Harry Burn - Sound Shore holds 801,772 shares worth $86,190,490, a 2.65% portfolio weight, flagged increased by 10.1% — 78.8% of the tracked cohort's UPS shares. The rest is an order of magnitude smaller: Bill Miller - Miller Value Partners holds 116,003 shares worth $12,470,322, a 2.95% weight, flagged decreased by 2.6%; Arnold Van Den Berg - Century Management holds 25,554 shares worth $2,747,055, a 0.58% weight, flagged increased by 1.4%; Bruce Berkowitz - Fairholme Capital opened the new position with 23,800 shares worth $2,558,500, a 0.17% weight; Hillman Capital Management holds 22,316 shares worth $2,398,970, a 1.74% weight, flagged unchanged; Tweedy Browne holds 16,630 shares worth $1,787,725, a 0.14% weight, flagged increased by 7.2%; and Mairs & Power Funds holds 11,508 shares worth $1,237,110, a 0.01% weight, flagged decreased by 34.0%. Per-holder quarter changes matched by filing continuity agree with the collection's own labels for all six continuing holders. The cohort's implied price, $107.50 per share, sits exactly on the June 30 close of $107.50. The price rose from $98.38 at March 31 to $107.50 at June 30, a change of +9.3% — this register added 8.89% more shares into that rise, and the largest holder did most of the adding.
Lens 2: institutions — 68 more filers, 95.8 million more shares
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the register grew on both counts. At June 30, 2026, 2,148 institutions reported positions, up 68 from 2,080 at March 31 (+3.27%), and 2,135 of them reported long positions. Reported shares rose 22.16%, from 432,186,097 to 527,976,232 shares — 95,790,135 more shares than the prior quarter. Reported aggregate value rose 32.49% to $58,477,415,532; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). Here the implied value per share, $110.76, sits 3.0% above the June 30 close of $107.50 — a gap, printed as found, and one more reason to headline the share count rather than the dollars: the share count rose 22.16% in a quarter when the price rose 9.3%. The two 13F lenses point the same way, at different speeds: the broad market added shares more than twice as fast as the tracked cohort's 8.89%, and it added filers while doing so.
Lens 3: the 5% register — three filings, and the Vanguard hand-off again
Our full parse holds three SC 13D/G filings for UPS — one SC 13G filing and two SC 13G/A amendments, and no SC 13D of any kind in the parsed set, three reporting-person rows across three names, the most recent filed April 30, 2026. Two of the rows are the hand-off pattern 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. In an SC 13G filed April 30, 2026, Vanguard Capital Management prints 55,681,378 shares (7.46%) as of March 31, 2026 — the register's largest and most recent row. The third row is older: in an SC 13G/A filed April 17, 2025, BlackRock, Inc. prints 44,732,830 shares (6.1%) as of March 31, 2025. That is the whole 5% register in our parsed coverage: three 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 re-papering their stakes.
Lens 4: insiders — three purchases ever, none in the last year; three sales, all of them in the last year
The parsed Form 4 record holds 93 filings through October 2, 2026. Across the whole record, open-market purchases total exactly 3 transactions, totalling 17,182 shares and $1,477,376.73, by three buyers, one of them recorded as an officer purchase of $1,000,815.63. Sales total exactly 3 transactions, totalling 25,014 shares and $2,655,195.12, all by a single seller and all three recorded as officer sales. The timing is the shape of this lens: the last year holds 49 filings, no purchases at all, and all three of the record's sales — every purchase in the parsed record is more than a year old, and every sale in it is inside the year. The last 90 days hold 3 filings and likewise no purchases and no sales. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 12 over its 90-day window, carries no UPS row at all; we report that absence as printed rather than merging the two collections. We assign no motives to any of it; a tape whose buying stopped more than a year ago while its selling continued is the fact.
Lens 5: Congress — one sale on the combined tape, and no member counted
Across the congressional record we maintain, UPS barely appears — and the aggregate prints its one line in an unusual shape, which we report exactly as printed. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026) carries 0 members, 0 purchase transactions and 1 sale transaction, with no most-recent purchase date and no party listed. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) prints the same row, and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no UPS row at all. So this lens is a single sale the combined aggregate does not attach to a counted member, and nothing else. We do not repair the aggregate or guess at the attribution; a near-blank congressional tape is itself the finding here.
Lens 6: short interest — 25,679,543 shares, and a series record set in August
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 137 settlements, from January 15, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 25,679,543 UPS shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 7.04. The latest step was up: the reading rose 1.34% from the prior settlement's 25,339,039 shares on August 31, 2026. The level sits just under the top of the series because the top is new: the peak is 26,089,164 shares on August 14, 2026, a fact we verified by taking the maximum across the whole series, and the latest reading sits 1.6% below it — the borrow set its record for the entire series one settlement before the prior one, in the middle of August. Against September 15, 2025 the latest reading is up 20.4% from 21,330,481 shares. Against the fundamentals file's 849,000,000 shares outstanding, that is 3.02% of the share count. The June 30, 2026 settlement — the date the 13F lenses snapshot — printed 23,118,697 shares, below the present. The recent settlements run 24,444,387 on July 15, then 23,812,182, 26,089,164, 25,339,039 and 25,679,543. The series minimum is the series' own first settlement: 6,814,834 shares on January 15, 2021 — the latest reading is nearly four times the level the series started at.
The borrow climbed through the summer and set its series record in August — after the June 30 snapshot the 13F lenses hold, and before the October headlines.
The gap, stated plainly
The narrative describes a carrier that beat its second quarter — revenue up 7.6% to $22.83 billion, adjusted earnings of $1.76 a share — and raised its year, that is hiring 100,000 seasonal workers for the peak, and that in the same week became the answer to a compliance question no filing prices: how a single missed email moved stealth-fighter parts into Chinese hands, with two federal investigations now open. The tracked superinvestors held 1,017,583 shares at June 30 across seven holders, having added 8.89% in a quarter when the price rose 9.3%, with one new position, three increases, two decreases, one unchanged and one exit, and with Sound Shore at 78.8% of the cohort after raising its own stake 10.1%. The full market moved faster: 527,976,232 reported shares, up 95,790,135, across 2,148 filers — 68 more than the prior quarter. The 5% register printed three filings, all index-complex paper: BlackRock at 6.1% on a March 2025 date, The Vanguard Group at zero, Vanguard Capital Management at 7.46%. Insiders, across 93 parsed filings, recorded three purchases totalling $1,477,376.73 — none of them in the last year — against three sales totalling $2,655,195.12, all of them inside the year and all by one seller. Congress registers a single sale and no counted member. And the borrow stands at 25,679,543 shares — up 20.4% year over year, 1.6% below the series record it set on August 14, 2026, at 7.04 days to cover. One plausible reading is that the registers are describing different UPS stories on different clocks: the long registers spent the second quarter adding — the broad market faster than the tracked cohort — the insider tape's buying is old and its selling is recent, the congressional tape is a single unattributed sale, and short sellers spent the summer building the largest borrow in this series' six years, a build the October compliance story will only enter in settlements published later this month. 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 1,017,583 shares, taken before both the record borrow and the F-35 report existed as news.
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 1,017,583 shares at June 30 across seven holders, after a +8.89% move built from three increases and one new position against two decreases and one exit. Whether Sound Shore's 801,772 shares — 78.8% of the cohort — grow again, hold, or reverse is the first thing the next register will answer, and whether Fairholme's new 23,800 shares become a position or a footnote is the second.
- 2. A first insider purchase in over a year — or a fourth sale. The parsed record holds exactly 3 purchase transactions, all of them more than a year old, and exactly 3 sale transactions, all of them inside the last year and all by one seller. Any open-market purchase would break a silence that has lasted the whole of the last year; any further sale would extend a one-seller pattern.
- 3. An original SC 13D, or a non-index 13G. The 5% register in our parsed coverage holds three filings, all of them BlackRock or Vanguard paper. A first 13D in the parsed set — any filer declaring an active stake — or a 13G from outside the index complexes would change this lens from re-papered passive holdings into something else.
- 4. Whether the borrow holds near its record. Short interest stands at 25,679,543 shares, up 20.4% in a year and 1.6% below the August 14, 2026 series record of 26,089,164, after a 1.34% uptick in the latest settlement. The settlements that will print the F-35 headlines have not been published yet: a reading above the August record would extend a series high, and a sharp fall would show the shorts covering into the story instead.
- 5. Whether the broad register keeps outgrowing the cohort. The full market added 95,790,135 reported shares (+22.16%) and 68 filers in the second quarter, while the tracked cohort added 83,058 shares (+8.89%). A second straight quarter of that gap would widen the distance between the two long registers this audit describes; a cohort-led quarter would close it.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by seven of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 1,017,583 shares, up 8.89% in the quarter its price rose 9.3%, with one holder at 78.8% — whose full market added 95,790,135 reported shares and 68 filers, whose insiders have recorded no purchase in a year against three sales by one seller, whose congressional register holds a single sale and no counted member, and whose borrow set its series record in August — all of it snapshot at June 30, before the borrow peaked and before the missed email became the story.
Related reading: Three of 83: The Superinvestors Raised AT&T 28.8% as the Price Fell 28.6%. One Holder Is 98.8% of the Stake. — Filing Tape #53; Two of 83: Both Superinvestors Trimmed Champion Homes as the Price Rose 18.5%. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #52; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. UPS's own page: United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) 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; UPS identified by CUSIP 911312106. Seven distinct managers hold long positions totalling 1,017,583 shares; all seven reported rows are long (no put or call rows); the direction count on the collection's labels is one new, three increased, two decreased and one unchanged, and the collection's exit list contains one UPS row (Lee Ainslie - Maverick Capital, 6,900 shares at March 31). Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (934,525 shares at March 31 across seven filing rows; 1,017,583 shares at June 30 across seven filing rows; change +8.89%) are from the site pipeline's holdings files on the same CUSIP basis in both quarters — the first-quarter seven include the exiting Maverick row and the second-quarter seven include the new Fairholme row — 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 and agree with the EDGAR collection's own percentage labels for all six continuing holders. Sound Shore's share of the cohort is 78.8% = 801,772 / 1,017,583.
- 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; 2,135 reported long positions out of 2,148 filers). UPS reports under the single CUSIP 911312106, and the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for that CUSIP matches the by-ticker row exactly (2,148 filers; 527,976,232 shares; $58,477,415,532 reported; 2,080 prior filers; $44,136,519,552 prior reported value). The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (1,661 and 1,593, a net of +68 that matches the change in holder count) are gross flows, so this audit headlines the net change. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($58,477,415,532 over 527,976,232 shares) implies $110.76 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $107.50 in our price file, a gap of +3.0% — 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 (93 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 3 across the parsed record (17,182 shares, $1,477,376.73, three buyers, one of them an officer purchase of $1,000,815.63) — and zero in the last year and zero in the 90-day window. Sale transactions total exactly 3 across the record (25,014 shares, $2,655,195.12, one seller, all three recorded as officer sales); the last year (49 filings) holds all three, and the 90-day window (3 filings) holds none. The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 12, 2026, 90-day window) carries no UPS row, and this audit reports that absence exactly as printed, without merging the two collections. "Purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 93 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G parsed filings (3 filings matching issuer CIK 1090727 on CUSIP 911312106, 3 reporting-person rows across 3 names: one SC 13G filing and two SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through April 30, 2026. The site aggregation's by-ticker file carries the same totals (3 filings, 3 reporters, latest filing April 30, 2026, maximum 7.46%, total reported 100,414,208 shares), so the aggregate and the parse agree here. BlackRock, Inc.'s row (44,732,830 shares at 6.1% as of March 31, 2025, filed April 17, 2025), The Vanguard Group's row (0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026) and Vanguard Capital Management's row (55,681,378 shares at 7.46% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 30, 2026) 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 three 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) carries 0 members, 0 purchase transactions and 1 sale transaction, with no most-recent purchase date and no party listed; the House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) prints the same figures (0 members, 0 purchases, 1 sale); and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no UPS row at all. The combined row therefore equals the House row, with no Senate contribution. This audit reports the aggregate exactly as printed — including the counted-member figure of zero alongside the single sale — and does not attribute the sale to any member.
- 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 (6,814,834 shares) to September 15, 2026. The latest reading is 25,679,543 shares on September 15, 2026, which sits 1.6% below the series maximum of 26,089,164 shares on August 14, 2026 (verified by a maximum query over the series, not read off the latest row), up 20.4% from the September 15, 2025 reading of 21,330,481 and up 1.34% from the prior settlement (25,339,039 on August 31, 2026). The series minimum is 6,814,834 shares on January 15, 2021 — the series' own first settlement. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact, so the October 7, 2026 headlines are not yet in this series. The share-count ratio (3.02%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries UPS's revenue of $88,661,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, its net income of $5,572,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, and its assets of $73,090,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 849,000,000 (as of December 31, 2025, sourced in the file to a weighted-average basic share count) and a file-computed market value of $79,050,390,518.19. The file's price for the name is $93.11 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $93.02, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for UPS through October 2, 2026 ($93.02 close, -6.2% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $120.00 on February 11, 2026; 252-session closing low $82.87 on October 10, 2025; closes of $98.38 at March 31, 2026 and $107.50 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of +9.3%; change from June 30 to October 2 of -13.5% ((93.02 / 107.50) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -22.5%, the gain from the 252-session closing low is +12.2%, and the series in our price file begins June 1, 2021. The October 7, 2026 share reaction is outside this file and is cited from press reports only, as stated in the text.
- Market context sources: Seeking Alpha / TradingView weekly trending summary, October 11, 2026 (UPS F-35 routing item, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday October 7 — checked October 12, 2026); the F-35 shipment reporting (Bloomberg News, October 7, 2026, as republished by TradingView and reported by multiple outlets in October 2026: cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door with radar-absorbing coating; Australia to San Francisco via South Korea and Taiwan, rerouted through Hong Kong after a delay; DSV warning email possibly missed across systems; parts in Chinese authorities' hands; Pentagon briefing for congressional staff on September 29, 2026; Pentagon and State Department investigations; shares reversing earlier gains to trade down less than 1% after the report); the company's second-quarter results (released July 28, 2026; revenue $22.83 billion, up 7.6%; adjusted earnings $1.76 a share against consensus near $1.65; GAAP diluted earnings $0.71 a share; full-year outlook raised to about $91.2 billion of revenue, about $7.22 of adjusted earnings and about $8.65 billion of adjusted operating profit; Amazon glide-down completed — company release as reported by multiple outlets); the peak-season announcement (October 7, 2026; 100,000 seasonal hires across hundreds of U.S. locations, against 125,000 in 2024; more than 4 billion RFID-enabled packages expected by the end of 2026; PIN-based Protected Delivery — company announcement as reported by Reuters and multiple outlets, October 2026); the restructuring context (up to 30,000 operational job cuts and 24 facility closures in 2026, announced in January 2026 — Reuters as reported October 2026); the consensus detail (Hold across 26 analysts: one Strong Buy, eleven Buy, eleven Hold, three Sell; average target $115.87 — MarketBeat data as reported October 9, 2026); the target changes (Truist $130 to $115, Buy maintained, October 7, 2026; Citi $132 to $122, Buy maintained, October 7, 2026 — as reported October 2026); the third-quarter report date (October 27, 2026 — company calendar as reported October 2026). Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- UPS is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) stock page. Series data: ups_lens_data.csv · ups_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: AT&T · Champion Homes · 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.