GetCoattail Research — The Filing Tape #62. Wells Fargo reports third-quarter earnings today, October 13, into a register that cannot agree with itself: Morgan Stanley made the stock a top pick on October 5 with a $102 target, JPMorgan had cut its target three days earlier, and the shares are roughly where they were a year ago. The filings describe the positioning underneath: fourteen tracked superinvestors holding 62,699,066 shares and moving almost none of them in the second quarter, a full market that added 303,491,689 shares in the same quarter, an insider record with no purchase in it at all, and a congressional record split between the two chambers.
Start with the narrative. Wells Fargo is the first of the large banks to report this season, with third-quarter results due before the open today, October 13, and a consensus near $1.85 a share on revenue near $22.35 billion. The bar was set in July: second-quarter earnings of $1.96 a share against a $1.73 consensus, on revenue of $22.62 billion, up 8.6% from a year earlier. The analyst register has spent the weeks since arguing in both directions. Morgan Stanley upgraded the shares to overweight on October 5, named the stock a top pick and set a $102 target. JPMorgan had gone the other way on October 2, trimming its target from $95.50 to $91.50 at neutral. HSBC opened coverage on September 28 at buy with a $108 target. MarketBeat's count puts the consensus at moderate buy with an average target of $99.75. The stock itself has not joined the argument: it returned about 0.4% over the year to October 6, and options markets price roughly a 5.00% move around today's print. The Wall Street Journal's October 7 stocks-to-watch recap had the shares down 1.5% on a reported housing-related investigation — a reminder that the bank carries headline risk into the print as well. Our own price file, which ends October 2, closes Wells Fargo at $80.45 — 16.5% below the 252-session closing high of $96.39 set on January 6, 2026, down 13.7% year to date, and down 2.7% since the June 30 snapshot the 13F lenses below are taken from.
Now the filings. For WFC — the sixty-second Filing Tape audit — the tape shows a fourteen-name tracked cohort that stood almost perfectly still, a broad register that added more than 300 million shares, a small passive 5% register, an insider record with no purchase anywhere in it, a congressional record whose two chambers point opposite ways, and a borrow at about half its 2021 peak.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — fourteen holders, and almost no movement
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 14 held WFC long totalling 62,699,066 shares worth $5,181,510,547, with no option rows in the register. The direction count on the collection's own labels, across the long rows, is six decreased, five increased and three unchanged — as divided a register as this series records. The cohort total moved from 63,368,281 long shares at March 31 to 62,699,066 at June 30, a change of -1.06%, a difference of -669,215 shares. One holder left: the collection's exit list names Steven Check - Check Capital Management, whose March position was 4,413 shares.
Half of what remains sits in one row. Dodge & Cox Funds holds 31,328,076 shares worth $2,588,952,219, a 1.36% portfolio weight — 50.0% of the tracked cohort's WFC shares — flagged increased by 0.5%, and the pipeline's March file carries the position at 31,168,331 shares, so the label and the continuity agree. Behind it, the register splits: Bill Nygren - Oakmark Funds holds 10,892,476 shares, decreased 0.8%; Richard Pzena - Pzena Investment Management holds 8,827,468 shares, increased 0.6%; Christopher Davis - Davis Advisors holds 8,008,728 shares, decreased 2.2%. The sharpest move in the register is Mairs & Power Funds, down 36.1% to 872,186 shares; the other nine holders each moved less than 11% or not at all, and every continuing holder's label agrees with the pipeline continuity check. The cohort's implied price, $82.64 per share, sits exactly on the June 30 close of $82.64. This register's second quarter, in full: fourteen holders, one small exit, a net change of about one share in a hundred — in a quarter when the price rose from $79.61 to $82.64, a change of +3.8%.
Lens 2: institutions — 78 more filers, 303.5 million more shares
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the register moved the other way from the tracked cohort. At June 30, 2026, 2,871 institutions reported positions, up 78 from 2,793 at March 31 (+2.79%), and 2,865 of them reported long positions. Reported shares rose 15.04%, from 2,018,516,778 to 2,322,008,467 shares — 303,491,689 more shares than the prior quarter. Reported aggregate value rose 19.25% to $192,675,097,763; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The implied value per share, $82.98, sits 0.4% above the June 30 close of $82.64 — a gap published as found. Where the tracked cohort's register is fourteen names standing still, the broad register is nearly three thousand filers who, in aggregate, ended the quarter holding about a seventh more shares than they started it with.
Lens 3: the 5% register — three passive filings
Our full parse holds exactly 3 SC 13D/G filings for WFC — one SC 13G and two SC 13G/A, and no SC 13D-family filing at all — four reporting-person rows, the most recent filed April 30, 2026. The register's maximum is Vanguard Capital Management at 231,650,665 shares (7.5%) as of March 31, 2026, filed April 30, 2026. Its sibling's row runs the other way: The Vanguard Group prints 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026 — the same re-papering pattern this series has recorded at other names, a stake moving between reporting entities inside one complex. The remaining rows are FMR LLC and Abigail P. Johnson, joint reporters on the same stake of 197,480,074.87 shares (5.8%) as of September 30, 2024, filed April 7, 2025. That is the whole 5% register in our parsed coverage: two index complexes and no activist paper of any kind.
Lens 4: insiders — no purchase in the record
The parsed Form 4 record holds 174 filings through October 2, 2026. Across the whole record, open-market purchases total 0 transactions — no insider purchase appears anywhere in the parsed coverage, at any date. Sales total 3 transactions, totalling 115,000 shares and $10,050,000.00, by three sellers, and all three are recorded as officer sales. The recent windows carry the same shape: the last year holds 92 filings with 0 purchases against the same 3 sales totalling 115,000 shares and $10,050,000.00; the last 90 days hold a single filing with no purchase and no sale transaction in it. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 13, carries no WFC row at all, so this audit prints the full parse as the record and says so. We assign no motives to any of it; the record itself — a buy side that is empty across the entire parsed history, against three officer sales in the most recent year — is the fact.
Lens 5: Congress — the two chambers point opposite ways
The congressional record we maintain is two-sided for this name, and split by chamber. The combined record (as of October 3, 2026) carries 2 recorded purchases and 1 recorded sale, one member, party R, with the most recent purchase dated September 1, 2026. The Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries both purchases — 2 buys, 0 sales, the same September 1 last-buy date. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the sale only — 0 buys, 1 sale. The chamber sum checks exactly: Senate (2 purchases, 0 sales) plus House (0 purchases, 1 sale) equals the combined record. Each chamber's tape, on its own, is one-directional; they simply point in opposite directions.
Lens 6: short interest — 31,549,023 shares, about half the 2021 peak
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 137 settlements, from January 15, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 31,549,023 WFC shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 2.2. That reading fell 7.0% from the prior settlement's 33,929,528 shares on August 31, 2026, a settlement that had itself spiked from 28,081,879 on August 14, after 28,452,806 on July 31 and 28,993,166 on July 15. Against September 15, 2025 the latest reading is down 28.3% from 44,007,011 shares. The series maximum is 58,473,871 shares on March 15, 2021, a fact we verified by taking the maximum across the whole series rather than reading it off the latest row, and the latest reading sits 46.0% below that peak — the borrow today is a little over half what it was in early 2021, when the series' first settlement, on January 15, 2021, printed 46,388,895 shares. Against the fundamentals file's 3,023,999,336 shares outstanding, the latest reading is 1.04% of the share count. The June 30, 2026 settlement — the date the 13F lenses snapshot — printed 28,597,263 shares; the latest reading sits 10.3% above it. The series minimum is 21,292,554 shares on January 31, 2023; the latest reading sits 48.2% above that low.
The borrow is neither crowded nor gone. It is a 2021-sized position reduced by almost half, with one August spike already retraced.
The gap, stated plainly
The narrative describes a bank reporting into divided opinion: a top-pick upgrade at a $102 target and an average target of $99.75 on one side, a target cut to $91.50 and a reported investigation on the other, a stock roughly flat over a year and down 13.7% year to date on our price file, and an options market pricing about a 5.00% move on today's print. The filings describe the positioning that preceded it. The tracked superinvestors held 62,699,066 shares at June 30 across fourteen holders, having moved -1.06% in a quarter when the price rose 3.8% — with one holder, Dodge & Cox, carrying 50.0% of the cohort after adding 0.5%, and the register's labels split six down, five up, three unchanged. The full market moved the other way: 2,322,008,467 reported shares, up 303,491,689, across 2,871 filers — 78 more than the prior quarter. The 5% register printed 3 filings, all passive: a Vanguard Capital Management stake at 7.5%, a Vanguard Group row at zero, and an FMR stake at 5.8%. Insiders, across 174 parsed filings, recorded no purchase at all — not in the last year, not in the last 90 days, not anywhere in the parsed record — against 3 sales, all by officers. Congress records 2 purchases and 1 sale, split so that the Senate holds the buys and the House holds the sale. And the borrow stands at 31,549,023 shares — down 28.3% in a year and 46.0% below its March 2021 peak, yet 10.3% above the June 30 settlement. One plausible reading is that the registers are describing a name the broad market accumulated while the concentrated cohort waited: the full register added about a seventh more shares while fourteen tracked holders netted to almost zero, the insider tape has never recorded a purchase in our coverage, the congressional tape disagrees with itself by chamber, and the short side sits at about half its former size — all of the 13F part of it snapshot at June 30, when the stock closed at $82.64, before the upgrade, the target cut and the earnings print the current story rests on. 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 62,699,066 shares, taken before the quarter that made the narrative.
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 62,699,066 shares at June 30 across fourteen holders, after a -1.06% move with labels split six down, five up and three unchanged. Whether Dodge & Cox builds on its 31,328,076-share position, whether Mairs & Power's 36.1% cut continues, and whether the register's split resolves in either direction are the first things the next register will answer.
- 2. A first insider purchase, at any size, at any date. The parsed record holds 0 purchases in total — across 174 filings and every window this audit prints — against 3 officer sales. A single open-market purchase would give this lens its first buy-side content in our coverage.
- 3. Whether the borrow holds above its June 30 level, or fades again. Short interest stands at 31,549,023 shares, 10.3% above the June 30, 2026 settlement of 28,597,263 and 46.0% below the March 15, 2021 peak of 58,473,871, having spiked to 33,929,528 on August 31 and retraced within one settlement. A reading back below the August 14 print of 28,081,879 would resume the fade; a sustained move above the August spike would mark a rebuild.
- 4. A second congressional direction in either chamber. The combined record carries 2 purchases (both Senate) and 1 sale (House only). A first House purchase or a first Senate sale would make one chamber two-sided and change this lens from a split into a signal with a direction.
- 5. A first SC 13D, or a new 5% name. The 5% register in our parsed coverage holds three passive filings from two complexes and no SC 13D-family filing. An original 13D from any filer, or a 13G from outside the Vanguard and FMR complexes, would give this lens its first non-passive content.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by fourteen of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 62,699,066 shares, moved -1.06% in the quarter its price rose 3.8%, with one holder carrying 50.0% of the stake — whose full market added 303,491,689 reported shares across 78 more filers, whose insiders have recorded no purchase anywhere in the parsed record against 3 officer sales, whose congressional register is 2 Senate purchases against 1 House sale, and whose borrow has fallen 46.0% from its 2021 peak while sitting 10.3% above its June 30 level — all of it snapshot at June 30, before the upgrade, the target cut and the earnings day the current story rests on.
Related reading: Three of 83: The Superinvestors Cut Marathon Petroleum 91.8% in Q2 While the Full Market Added 19.4% — Filing Tape #61; Ten of 83: One Holder Is 58.9% of the Superinvestors' Salesforce Stake. No Officer Has Ever Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #60; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. WFC's own page: Wells Fargo & Company (WFC) 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; WFC identified by CUSIP 949746101. Fourteen distinct managers hold long positions totalling 62,699,066 shares; there are no option rows for this name in the collection. The direction count on the collection's labels, across the long rows, is six decreased, five increased and three unchanged; the collection's exit list contains one WFC row (Steven Check - Check Capital Management, 4,413 shares at March 31). Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (63,368,281 long shares at March 31; 62,699,066 long shares at June 30; change -1.06%) are from the site pipeline's holdings files on the same CUSIP basis in both quarters, and the pipeline's second-quarter totals match the EDGAR collection exactly on both shares and value (differences of 0 shares and $0). Per-holder quarter changes are matched by filing continuity across the two pipeline files, and all fourteen continuing holders agree with their labels: Oakmark Funds 10,983,221 → 10,892,476 = -0.8%; Davis Advisors 8,190,871 → 8,008,728 = -2.2%; First Pacific Advisors 872,730 → 784,923 = -10.1%; Gardner Russo & Quinn 7,450 → 7,451 = 0.0%; Markel Group 204,450 → 204,450 = 0.0%; Pzena Investment Management 8,773,128 → 8,827,468 = +0.6%; Yacktman Asset Management 100,437 → 104,803 = +4.3%, with the seven unnamed March rows matched on share counts to Dodge & Cox Funds (31,168,331 → 31,328,076 = +0.5%), Chou Associates (59,542 → 59,542 = 0.0%), Mairs & Power Funds (1,365,876 → 872,186 = -36.1%), Sound Shore (902,430 → 890,946 = -1.3%), Tweedy Browne (515,920 → 497,011 = -3.7%), Torray Funds (3,000 → 3,000 = 0.0%) and Matrix Asset Advisors (216,482 → 218,006 = +0.7%). Dodge & Cox's share of the cohort is 50.0% = 31,328,076 / 62,699,066.
- 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; 2,865 reported long positions out of 2,871 filers). WFC reports under a single CUSIP spelling, 949746101, and the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP file carries the same row — the cross-check matches on every field (holders, shares, reported value, prior holders and prior reported value). The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (1,943 and 1,865, a net of +78 that matches the change in holder count) are gross flows, so this audit headlines the net change. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($192,675,097,763 over 2,322,008,467 shares) implies $82.98 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $82.64 in our price file, a gap of +0.4% — 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 (174 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 0 across the parsed record (0 shares, $0.00, zero buyers, zero of them recorded as officer purchases); the last year holds 0 and the 90-day window holds 0. Sale transactions total 3 across the record (115,000 shares, $10,050,000.00, three sellers, all 3 recorded as officer sales); the last year holds all 3 (115,000 shares, $10,050,000.00, three sellers, all officer sales) and the 90-day window holds 0, its single filing carrying no purchase or sale transaction. The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 13, 2026) carries no WFC row, so this audit prints the full parse alone rather than two counts, and says so here and in the lens text.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G parsed filings (3 filings matching issuer CIK 72971 on CUSIP 949746101, 4 reporting-person rows across 4 names: one SC 13G filing and two SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D-family filings), filings through April 30, 2026. The site aggregation's by-ticker file carries the same totals (3 filings, 4 reporters, latest filing April 30, 2026, maximum 7.5%, total reported 626,610,814.74 shares), so the aggregate and the parse agree here; the aggregation's total sums reporting-person rows across different dates and entities — including the FMR LLC and Abigail P. Johnson rows, which report the same stake jointly — so it is not used as a stake figure in the article. Vanguard Capital Management's row (231,650,665 shares at 7.5% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 30, 2026, SC 13G), The Vanguard Group's row (0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026, SC 13G/A) and the FMR LLC / Abigail P. Johnson rows (197,480,074.87 shares each at 5.8% as of September 30, 2024, filed April 7, 2025, SC 13G/A) are reported as filed, under the reporting-person names exactly as they appear. No reason for any change is asserted — the filings themselves are the record. The parsed coverage for this issuer holds these 3 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 2 recorded purchases and 1 recorded sale, a most-recent purchase date of September 1, 2026, and an aggregate member count of one (party R) for this ticker; the chamber sum checks exactly: Senate (2 purchases, 0 sales, as of October 1, 2026, one member, last buy September 1, 2026) plus House (0 purchases, 1 sale, as of October 3, 2026) equals the combined record. Transaction counts are reported as the aggregates carry them; this audit does not reconstruct individual filers from the aggregate beyond what the aggregate itself states.
- 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 (46,388,895 shares) to September 15, 2026. The latest reading is 31,549,023 shares on September 15, 2026, down 7.0% from the prior settlement (33,929,528 on August 31, 2026), which had risen from 28,081,879 on August 14, 2026, following 28,452,806 on July 31 and 28,993,166 on July 15. The series maximum is 58,473,871 shares on March 15, 2021 (verified by a maximum query over the series, not read off the latest row), so the latest reading sits 46.0% below the peak; against September 15, 2025 (44,007,011 shares) it is down 28.3%. The series minimum is 21,292,554 shares on January 31, 2023, so the latest reading sits 48.2% above the low. The June 30, 2026 settlement printed 28,597,263 shares, so the latest reading sits 10.3% above the 13F snapshot date's borrow. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact, so today's earnings release is not yet in this series. The share-count ratio (1.04%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries WFC's revenue of $85,063,000,000 labelled fiscal 2019 in the file's Revenues field, its net income of $21,338,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025, and its assets of $2,148,631,000,000 labelled fiscal 2025; the revenue field's labelled year is printed as the file carries it rather than restated. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 3,023,999,336 (as of July 17, 2026 in the file, sourced in the file to the issuer's reported shares-outstanding figure) and a file-computed market value of $246,486,192,337.32. The file's price for the name is $81.51 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $80.45, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for WFC through October 2, 2026 ($80.45 close, -13.7% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $96.39 on January 6, 2026; 252-session closing low $73.42 on May 15, 2026; closes of $79.61 at March 31, 2026 and $82.64 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of +3.8%; change from June 30 to October 2 of -2.7% ((80.45 / 82.64) − 1); change from the 252-session low of +9.6% ((80.45 / 73.42) − 1), and the drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -16.5%. The series in our price file begins June 1, 2021 at $47.26.
- Market context sources: Wells Fargo third-quarter schedule and consensus (results due before the open on October 13, 2026, at about 7:00 a.m. ET with a 10:00 a.m. ET call — company release of October 5, 2026 as reported by Business Wire; consensus near $1.85 a share on revenue near $22.35 billion — AlphaStreet preview, checked October 13, 2026); second-quarter results (published July 14, 2026; earnings of $1.96 a share against a $1.73 consensus; revenue $22.62 billion, up 8.6% year over year — MarketBeat figures as reported by Transcript Daily, October 12, 2026); the Morgan Stanley action (October 5, 2026; upgrade to overweight, top-pick designation, $102 target — CNBC as reported by Insider Monkey, October 6, 2026); the JPMorgan action (October 2, 2026; target cut from $95.50 to $91.50, neutral — Markets Insider as reported by ad-hoc-news, checked October 13, 2026); the HSBC action (September 28, 2026; coverage initiated at buy with a $108 target — MarketBeat as reported by ad-hoc-news, checked October 13, 2026); consensus counts (moderate buy, average target $99.75 from 25 analysts — MarketBeat as reported by ad-hoc-news, October 6, 2026); the one-year return (about +0.37% over twelve months to October 6, 2026 — Insider Monkey, October 6, 2026); the options-implied move (about 5.00% for Wells Fargo around the October 13 report — Benzinga Pro data as reported by TradingView News, checked October 13, 2026); Wall Street Journal, Stocks to Watch Recap (October 7, 2026; Wells Fargo shares fell 1.5% after the Journal reported a housing-commitment investigation — checked October 13, 2026). Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- WFC is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Wells Fargo & Company (WFC) stock page. Series data: wfc_lens_data.csv · wfc_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: Marathon Petroleum · Salesforce · 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.