GetCoattail Research — Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States and sits eighth on MarketBeat's trending-stocks list, weeks after a quarterly report that beat the earnings consensus and still sent the shares down about 9%, and days after an unusual surge in call-option buying. The filings describe a register dominated at every level by a single name: six tracked superinvestors hold the stock, and one foundation trust is 97.6% of everything they hold; the full market added 569,912,868 reported shares in the second quarter while the tracked cohort's share count moved by two thousand shares; the founding family's vehicle prints 44.21% of the company in a single 13D row; its insiders have recorded zero open-market purchases across the entire parsed record against 208 sales; and the short borrow, while down from its February peak, is almost twice its year-ago level.
Start with the narrative. Walmart reported its fiscal second quarter on August 20, 2026: revenue of $187.94 billion, up 5.9% year over year, and adjusted earnings of $0.81 per share against a $0.74 consensus. The stock fell about 9% anyway, on reporting that comparable-sales growth had slowed and on guidance that set the next quarter's adjusted earnings at $0.62 to $0.64, with the full year at $2.80 to $2.87. Analysts largely trimmed rather than abandoned the name in the days after — JPMorgan cut its target from $137 to $125, BNP Paribas Exane from $146 to $137, and Wells Fargo from $140 to $120, with Mizuho following from $130 to $125 in late September, while Goldman Sachs held a Buy with a $132 target and TD Cowen held a Buy at $125. MarketBeat's consensus, aggregated across 39 firms, is a Moderate Buy with an average target of $131.74. On October 6, call-option buying in the stock ran to 267,098 contracts, roughly 99% above its average daily volume, and on October 8 the company rolled out one-hour Express Pickup for Walmart+ members. Our own price file, which ends October 2, puts the last close at $104.26 — down 22.3% from the 252-session closing high of $134.20 set on May 19, 2026, up 3.6% from the closing low of $100.61 set on November 19, 2025, and down 6.4% year to date on that file.
Now the filings. For Walmart — the forty-sixth Filing Tape audit — the tape shows a tracked cohort that is one position wearing six names, a broad register that quietly added more than half a billion shares, a founding-family block that dwarfs every other lens, and a purchase column that has never been used.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — six holders, 8,593,330 shares, one of them is 97.6%
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 6 held Walmart long — no option rows — totalling 8,593,330 shares worth $973,280,562. The direction count, on the collection's own labels, is two unchanged, two increased and two decreased — no new positions and no exits for this issuer.
Almost all of it is one holder. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust holds 8,390,477 shares worth $950,305,425, a 2.76% portfolio weight, flagged unchanged — 97.6% of the tracked cohort's Walmart shares. The other five holders together hold 202,853 shares. Dodge & Cox Funds holds 172,435 shares worth $19,529,988, a 0.01% weight, flagged decreased by 1.1%. Mairs & Power Funds holds 15,800 shares worth $1,789,508, flagged increased by 0.6%. Thomas Russo's Gardner Russo & Quinn holds 8,465 shares worth $958,746, flagged decreased by 13.1%. David Katz's Matrix Asset Advisors holds 3,191 shares worth $361,419, unchanged. Bill Nygren's Oakmark Funds holds 2,962 shares worth $335,476, flagged increased by 42.4% — the cohort's largest percentage move, on its smallest position. The cohort total moved from 8,595,498 shares at March 31 to 8,593,330 at June 30, a change of -0.03%, a difference of -2,168 shares: Dodge & Cox trimmed 1,875 shares and Russo trimmed 1,275, Nygren added 882 and Mairs & Power added 100, and the Gates Foundation Trust and Katz rows did not move by a single share. The cohort's implied price, $113.26 per share, matches the June 30 close exactly. The price fell from $124.28 at March 31 to $113.26 at June 30, a change of -8.9% — the tracked register stood still in share terms through a falling quarter, and its reported value fell with the price, from $1,068,248,499 to $973,280,562.
Lens 2: institutions — 4,414 filers, up 10, shares up 24.04%
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the June quarter looks different in the two dimensions this lens reports. At June 30, 2026, 4,414 institutions reported positions, up just 10 from 4,404 at March 31 (+0.23%), and 4,397 reported long positions. Reported shares rose 24.04%, from 2,371,048,001 to 2,940,960,869 shares — 569,912,868 more shares than the prior quarter. Reported aggregate value rose 12.71% to $334,926,159,912; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The implied value per share, $113.88, sits just 0.5% above the June 30 close of $113.26 — one of the tightest gaps between reported value and close in this series, which makes the share-count jump harder to dismiss as an artefact of the aggregation. Set the two 13F lenses side by side and the quarter has a strange signature: the filer count and the tracked cohort both stood still, while the broad register's reported share count rose by nearly a quarter. Whatever explains the gap — position sizing by filers already in the register is the arithmetic candidate the counts leave open — it did not come from new names arriving or from the managers this site tracks.
Lens 3: the 5% register — three filings, all of them amendments, and one row is 44.21% of the company
Our full parse holds just three SC 13D/G filings for Walmart — one SC 13D/A amendment and two SC 13G/A amendments, and no original filing of any kind in the parsed set, 7 reporting-person rows across 7 names, the most recent filed March 27, 2026. The register is small because the position it exists to record is not: in an SC 13D/A filed March 3, 2026, Walton Enterprises, LLC prints 3,523,409,231 shares (44.21%) as of February 27, 2026 — the largest single row, by percentage, in this series — with Walton Family Holdings Trust printed alongside at 520,735,838 shares (6.53%) in the same filing; the rows are reported here as filed and never summed. The other amendment on the family side, an SC 13G/A filed January 31, 2025 on positions as of December 31, 2024, prints the individual family rows: Jim C. Walton at 31,521,372 shares (0.39%), Alice L. Walton at 20,245,740 shares (0.25%), WALTON S ROBSON at 7,029,557 shares (0.09%), and the John T. Walton Estate Trust at 0 shares. The register's most recent filing is also its emptiest: The Vanguard Group prints 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026 in an SC 13G/A filed March 27, 2026. There is no activist paper in this register and no new-money paper either — three amendments, one of which restates a founding family's hold on nearly half the company, and one of which records a zero.
Lens 4: insiders — zero purchases in the parsed record
The parsed Form 4 record holds 368 filings through October 2, 2026, and one of its two columns has never been used. Across the whole record, open-market purchases total exactly 0 transactions — not in the last 90 days, not in the last year, not at any point in the parsed coverage, by any buyer. Against that empty column stand 208 sales totalling 63,288,416 shares and $6,638,003,199.91, by fourteen sellers, 125 of the 208 recorded as officer sales. The recent windows are one-directional as well: the last year holds 111 sales for $2,948,570,059.92 by twelve sellers, and the last 90 days hold 11 sales for $8,935,384.82 by four sellers, all 11 of them officer sales. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 11 over its 90-day window, likewise records zero purchases; it counts the sales slightly differently — 10 transactions totalling $8,518,788.92 by four sellers — and we note the difference rather than blending the two collections (see methodology). On the fact this lens exists to answer, the two collections agree completely: in the windows both cover, no Walmart insider has bought a share in the open market. We assign no motives to any of it; a purchase column that has stayed empty across 368 filings is the fact.
Lens 5: Congress — one House member, three transactions
Across the congressional record we maintain (combined record as of October 3, 2026), Walmart shows a small, one-chamber footprint: one member, one buy transaction and two sell transactions, with the most recent buy dated August 26, 2026, the member recorded with party D. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries the identical record, and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Walmart row at all. In a series where most heavily traded names show at least a handful of members on both sides of the Capitol, a single House member accounting for the entire congressional lens is itself the data point: there is no broad congressional register in this stock to read.
Lens 6: short interest — 80,590,071 shares, nearly double the year-ago level
FINRA's files carry the borrow across 137 settlements, from January 15, 2021. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 80,590,071 Walmart shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 3.89, down 5.57% from the prior settlement. Against the fundamentals file's 7,933,746,241 shares outstanding, that is 1.02% of the share count — a small ratio, held down by the size of the denominator. The trend is the story rather than the level: the series maximum is 103,328,744 shares on February 13, 2026, which puts the latest reading 22.0% below the peak, but against September 15, 2025 the latest reading is up 97.4% from 40,824,255 shares — the borrow nearly doubled in a year before it crested. The June 30, 2026 settlement — the date the 13F lenses snapshot — printed 83,880,603 shares, close to the latest reading: through the quarter in which institutions added 569,912,868 reported shares, the borrow barely moved. The series minimum is 9,959,212 shares on March 15, 2023.
The recent settlements run 74,400,164 on July 15, then 72,040,994, 63,070,567, 85,346,340 and 80,590,071 — a high, unsettled plateau a year after the borrow was half this size. Set beside the price file, the picture is a stock that closed at $104.26 on October 2, down 7.9% from its June 30 close, carrying a borrow equal to 1.02% of its share count that has nonetheless almost doubled in twelve months.
The gap, stated plainly
The registers describe a stock the analyst community rates with an average target of $131.74 — with the price down 22.3% from its May closing high on our file through October 2 — weeks after an earnings beat that the market sold, and days after call-option buying ran at twice its average pace. The tracked superinvestors held 8,593,330 shares at June 30 across six holders, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust at 97.6% of it, having moved -0.03% in a quarter when the price fell 8.9%. The full market went a different way on the dimension that counts shares: 2,940,960,869 reported shares, up 569,912,868, across 4,414 filers — just 10 more than the prior quarter. The 5% register printed three filings, all of them amendments and not one an original filing: its maximum row is a 44.21% Walton Enterprises print from February 2026, and its most recent filing records The Vanguard Group at zero. Insiders, across 368 parsed filings, recorded zero purchases against 208 sales for $6,638,003,199.91. Congress registers one House member, one buy and two sells. And the borrow, at 80,590,071 shares, stands 22.0% below the peak it printed in February 2026 and 97.4% above where it stood a year ago. One plausible reading is that the registers run on different clocks and different mandates: the tracked cohort is in practice a single foundation position that did not move, the broad register added shares through existing filers in the same quarter, the founding family's vehicle holds close to half the company on a timescale that does not turn over in quarters, its own insiders have left the purchase column empty for the entire parsed record, and short sellers built a position twice last year's size into a falling stock and have begun, unevenly, to trim it. 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 8,593,330 shares at June 30 across six holders, after a -0.03% move in a falling quarter, with the Gates Foundation Trust's 8,390,477 shares unchanged. Whether that row moves at all — and whether Dodge & Cox's 172,435 shares keep shrinking — is the whole lens.
- 2. A first insider purchase, ever. The parsed record holds exactly 0 purchase transactions against 208 sales. A single open-market purchase — by any insider, of any size — would change this lens from a permanently one-sided tape into a two-sided one; continued silence would extend one of the emptiest purchase columns in this series.
- 3. An original 13D or 13G filing. The 5% register holds three filings, all of them amendments, headed by a 44.21% family row. A first original filing in the parsed set — any filer declaring a new 5% position — would change this lens from a record of restatements into something else.
- 4. Whether the borrow keeps retreating from its 2026 peak. Short interest stands at 80,590,071 shares, 22.0% below the series peak of 103,328,744 printed on February 13, 2026 and 97.4% above its year-ago level. A return toward the September 2025 reading of 40,824,255 would unwind the year's build; a print above the June 30, 2026 settlement of 83,880,603 would resume it.
- 5. A first Senate trade, or a second member. The congressional register holds one House member, one buy and two sells, and no Senate row. A first Senate print, or any second member in either chamber, would widen a lens that currently rests on a single member's three transactions.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by six of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 8,593,330 shares, 97.6% of it one foundation trust that did not move a share in the quarter — whose full market added 569,912,868 reported shares across just 10 net new filers in the same quarter, whose 5% register — three filings, all amendments, no originals — is headed by a founding-family row of 44.21%, whose insiders have recorded zero purchases in the parsed record, whose congressional register is one House member, and whose borrow has nearly doubled in a year even as it retreats from its February peak.
Related reading: Two of 83: One Holder Is 83.5% of the Superinvestors' Rocket Lab Stake. Its Insiders Have Never Bought a Share. — Filing Tape #45; Two of 83: One Holder Is 79.1% of the Superinvestors' Constellation Energy Stake. Its Insiders Have Bought Once. — Filing Tape #44; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. Walmart's own page: Walmart Inc. (WMT) 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; Walmart identified by CUSIP 931142103. Six distinct managers hold long positions totalling 8,593,330 shares; all six reported rows are long (no put or call rows); the direction count on the collection's labels is two unchanged, two increased and two decreased, and the collection's exit list contains no Walmart row. Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (8,595,498 shares at March 31 across six filing rows; 8,593,330 shares at June 30 across six filing rows; change -0.03%) 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). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust's share of the cohort is 97.6% = 8,390,477 / 8,593,330.
- 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; 4,397 of the 4,414 reported long positions). Its holder count, share count, reported value, prior holder count and prior reported value match the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for 931142103 exactly (4,414 filers; 2,940,960,869 shares; $334,926,159,912; 4,404 prior filers; $297,164,994,842) — Walmart reports under a single CUSIP, so the two aggregations are the same set counted once. The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (2,036 and 2,026, a net of +10 that matches the change in holder count) are gross flows inside a register whose membership barely changed, so this audit headlines the net change and does not build on the gross fields. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($334,926,159,912 over 2,940,960,869 shares) implies ≈$113.88 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $113.26 in our price file, a gap of +0.5%. 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 (368 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 0 across the parsed record — in the 90 days, the year and the full record through October 2, 2026, with zero buyers in every window. Sale transactions total 208 across the record (63,288,416 shares, $6,638,003,199.91, fourteen sellers, 125 of the 208 recorded as officer sales), 111 of them in the year through October 2, 2026 and 11 in the 90 days through October 2, 2026 (all 11 recorded as officer sales). The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 11, 2026, 90-day window) also records zero purchases, and counts sales slightly differently — 10 transactions totalling $8,518,788.92 by four sellers. The two collections use different sale-counting rules; both agree the purchase column is empty, and this audit headlines the full parse. "Purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 368 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G aggregation and parsed filings (3 filings matching issuer CIK 104169 on CUSIP 931142103, 7 reporting-person rows across 7 names: one SC 13D/A amendment and two SC 13G/A amendments, no original filings of any kind), filings through March 27, 2026. The site aggregation's WMT row counts the same 3 filings. Walton Enterprises, LLC's row (3,523,409,231 shares at 44.21% as of February 27, 2026, filed March 3, 2026, with Walton Family Holdings Trust printed alongside at 520,735,838 shares at 6.53% in the same filing), the individual family rows in the SC 13G/A filed January 31, 2025 (Jim C. Walton 31,521,372 shares at 0.39%, Alice L. Walton 20,245,740 shares at 0.25%, WALTON S ROBSON 7,029,557 shares at 0.09% and the John T. Walton Estate Trust at 0 shares, all as of December 31, 2024) and The Vanguard Group's row (0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 27, 2026) are reported as filed, under the reporting-person names exactly as they appear. No rows are summed, because aggregation totals across these rows would add different dates together. 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 — one member, one buy transaction and two sell transactions, most recent buy August 26, 2026, party D, all of it in the House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026); the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries no Walmart row. The aggregates record counts and dates, not trade sizes, and this audit reports them on that basis.
- 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 (15,011,652 shares) to September 15, 2026. The latest reading is 80,590,071 shares on September 15, 2026, which sits 22.0% below the series maximum of 103,328,744 shares on February 13, 2026 and 97.4% above the September 15, 2025 reading of 40,824,255; the change from the prior settlement is -5.57%. The latest row's prior-settlement field (85,346,340) matches the prior settlement file's reported figure exactly. The series minimum is 9,959,212 shares on March 15, 2023. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact. The share-count ratio (1.02%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries Walmart's revenue of $713,163,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026, its net income of $21,893,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026, and its assets of $284,668,000,000 labelled fiscal 2026 — all three fields carry the same fiscal year in the file. The file is marked ok for this name, with no missing fields: shares outstanding of 7,933,746,241 (as of August 26, 2026, sourced in the file to a dei EntityCommonStockSharesOutstanding count) and a file-computed market value of $850,497,572,823.3279. The file's price for the name is $107.20 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $104.26, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for Walmart through October 2, 2026 ($104.26 close, -6.4% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $134.20 on May 19, 2026; 252-session closing low $100.61 on November 19, 2025; closes of $124.28 at March 31, 2026 and $113.26 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of -8.9%; change from June 30 to October 2 of -7.9% ((104.26 / 113.26) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is -22.3%, the gain from the 252-session closing low is +3.6%, and the series in our price file begins June 1, 2021 at $47.22.
- Market context sources: MarketBeat's trending-stocks list as checked on October 12, 2026 (Walmart eighth, at $111.35, consensus Moderate Buy, average target $131.74); the consensus detail reported October 10, 2026 (39 firms: 32 Buy, 3 Strong Buy, 4 Hold; average target $131.74 — The Lincolnian Online, on MarketBeat data); the unusually high call-option buying reported October 6, 2026 (267,098 call contracts against an average daily volume of 134,432 — American Banking News); the company's fiscal second-quarter 2027 results as reported August 20, 2026 (revenue of $187.94 billion, up 5.9% year over year; adjusted earnings of $0.81 per share against a $0.74 consensus; third-quarter adjusted EPS guidance of $0.62 to $0.64 and full-year guidance of $2.80 to $2.87; the shares down about 9% on the report amid slowing comparable-sales growth — American Banking News and BestStocks reporting); the post-earnings target changes (JPMorgan $137 to $125, BNP Paribas Exane $146 to $137 and Wells Fargo $140 to $120 around August 21, 2026; Mizuho $130 to $125 on September 29, 2026; Goldman Sachs maintaining Buy at $132 and TD Cowen maintaining Buy at $125 — The Lincolnian Online, ad-hoc-news and TipRanks reporting); the Express Pickup rollout for Walmart+ members reported October 8, 2026 (ad-hoc-news, on Yahoo Finance reporting); and the next earnings date of November 19, 2026 as aggregated by Investing.com. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- Walmart is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Walmart Inc. (WMT) stock page. Series data: wmt_lens_data.csv · wmt_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: Rocket Lab · Constellation Energy · 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.