GetCoattail Research — Block runs Square, Cash App and Afterpay, and in October it has been back in the retail conversation — fourth on AltIndex's meme-stock list — while a steady run of insider-sale headlines has followed one director's 6,000-share sales. The filings describe two registers moving in opposite directions: only two of our 83 superinvestors hold the stock, but one of them just opened a new position in a quarter when the full market added 104 filers, and the insider record contains not one open-market purchase.
Start with the narrative. AltIndex's meme-stock list, updated on the evening of October 10, ranked Block fourth by Reddit mentions over the prior 24 hours, with 63 mentions and a bearish sentiment flag — behind GameStop, AST SpaceMobile and Netflix, two of which this series has already audited. The news flow behind the chatter is not an earnings beat or a product launch. Through early October, financial outlets have run near-daily items on director Anthony Eisen selling 6,000 shares at a time — transactions dated October 2, 5, 7 and 9 among them — each reported as executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. The analyst backdrop, as aggregated by MarketBeat and checked October 10, is a Moderate Buy consensus from 42 analysts with an average price target of $95.45; Robert W. Baird raised its target from $105 to $106 on October 2 and kept an outperform rating. Our own price file, which ends October 2, puts the last close at $74.33 — 12.4% below the 252-session closing high of $84.85 set on August 27, and 51.4% above the 252-session closing low of $49.09 set on February 12.
Now the filings. For Block — the thirty-sixth Filing Tape audit — the tape splits cleanly: institutions spent the June quarter arriving, insiders have spent the entire parsed record leaving, and Congress is not in the stock at all.
Lens 1: the superinvestors — two holders, 7,134,950 shares, one of them new
We track 83 large, mostly long-only managers whose 13F portfolios we collect directly from SEC EDGAR. As of June 30, 2026, 2 held Block long — no option rows — totalling 7,134,950 shares worth $542,256,200. The direction count is one increased and one new: no decreases, no unchanged rows, and no exits anywhere in the collection for this name.
The larger holder is Chase Coleman's Tiger Global Management, at 4,576,007 shares worth $347,776,532, a 1.45% portfolio weight, increased 14.4% in the quarter — 64.1% of the tracked cohort's Block shares. The second holder is the story: Daniel Loeb's Third Point opened a new position of 2,558,943 shares worth $194,479,668, a 4.16% portfolio weight — the larger commitment of the two as a share of its own book. A quarter earlier the pipeline's CUSIP file held a single row of 4,000,000 shares; that row's filer prefix matches Tiger Global's second-quarter filing, and its share count grows into Tiger Global's second-quarter row at exactly the +14.4% the row itself reports, so the register's shape is one holder adding and one holder arriving. The cohort total moved from 4,000,000 to 7,134,950 shares, a change of +78.37%, a difference of +3,134,950 shares, in a quarter when the price rose from $60.18 at March 31 to $76.00 at June 30, a change of +26.3%. The cohort's reported value implies $76.00 per share, matching the June 30 close exactly.
Lens 2: institutions — 1,081 filers, shares up 22.64%
Zoom out to the whole 13F market and the June quarter was an arrival, not an exit. At June 30, 2026, 1,081 institutions reported positions, up 104 from 977 at March 31 (+10.64%), and 1,076 reported long positions. Reported shares rose 22.64%, from 359,101,321 to 440,416,677 shares — 81,315,356 more shares than the prior quarter. Reported aggregate value rose 58.65% to $32,083,296,402; the aggregate includes option rows, so we headline filer and share counts and label dollars "reported" (see methodology). The implied value per share, $72.85, sits 4.1% below the June 30 close of $76.00. The tracked cohort and the full market point the same way this quarter — both added — but they are different kinds of addition: the market's is broad, spread across 104 net new filers, while the cohort's +78.37% is two managers, one of them brand new.
Lens 3: the 5% register — eight filings, and the largest name went to zero before reappearing
Our full parse holds eight SC 13D/G filings for Block — two SC 13G originals and six SC 13G/A amendments, four reporting persons, the most recent filed August 14, 2026, and no SC 13D originals at all. The largest chain belongs to The Vanguard Group: 56,149,057 shares (10.11%) as of May 30, 2025, then 68,436,549 shares (12.45%) as of September 30, 2025, then 0 shares (0.0%) as of March 13, 2026, filed March 26, 2026. A separate Vanguard entity, Vanguard Capital Management, then printed 41,692,502 shares (7.73%) as of March 31, 2026 in an original SC 13G filed April 29, 2026 — the same two-step pattern this register printed for Constellation Brands in the previous audit, and we report the rows as filed rather than merging the entities. BlackRock printed 29,075,247 shares (5.2%) as of March 31, 2025, then 38,928,405 shares (7.1%) as of September 30, 2025. T. Rowe Price Associates printed 47,532,186 shares (8.6%) as of June 30, 2025, then 39,734,450 shares (7.4%) as of June 30, 2026 — the register's latest filing, submitted August 14, 2026. We report rows as filed and never sum them: the aggregation's total across these rows would add different dates together and present a single position's history as if it were a register total.
Lens 4: insiders — zero purchases in the parsed record, $102,097,670.87 of sales
The parsed Form 4 record holds 181 filings through October 2, 2026. Across it, open-market purchases total zero transactions — zero shares, $0, no buyers at all. Against that stand 196 sales totalling 1,338,398 shares and $102,097,670.87, by eight sellers, 106 of them recorded as officer sales. The last year holds the same shape at higher speed: zero purchases against 140 sales of 1,124,731 shares for $87,500,087.65 by seven sellers, 50 of them recorded as officer sales. The last 90 days hold 76 sales of 648,913 shares for $52,574,221.81 by four sellers across 35 filings — still no purchases. Our site's insider aggregate, compiled as of October 11 over its own 90-day window, reads the same direction — zero purchases, 72 sales, $47,696,861.81, four sellers, no last-buy date — and differs from the full parse's 90-day figures (76 sales, $52,574,221.81 through October 2) because the windows and aggregation differ; we headline the full parse and print both in the methodology rather than implying they are one number. The October headlines about repeated 6,000-share director sales sit on top of this record; the record itself is older and wider than any one seller — eight sellers, no buyers, across the whole coverage. We assign no motives to any of it; the record's shape is the fact.
Lens 5: Congress — no record in either chamber
Across the congressional record we maintain (combined record as of October 3, 2026), Block shows no record at all — the combined aggregate carries no XYZ row. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) carries no Block record, and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) carries none either. This lens is therefore not "zero purchases against some sales"; it is an absence, reported as an absence. Congressional disclosures report value ranges rather than exact amounts, so this lens would record direction and counts only — and here there is nothing to count.
Lens 6: short interest — 13,406,927 shares under the current symbol, down 44.5% from the peak
One sourcing note comes first, because it shapes this lens: Block changed its ticker from SQ to XYZ in January 2025. FINRA's files carry the borrow under SQ through the January 15, 2025 settlement (11,426,246 shares, the last of 97 settlements under that symbol) and under XYZ from January 31, 2025. The series we publish is the current symbol's: 40 settlements. As of September 15, 2026 — the most recent settlement — 13,406,927 Block shares were sold short, with days-to-cover of 3.65, up 4.36% from the prior settlement. Against the fundamentals file's 612,243,000 shares outstanding, that is 2.19% of the share count. The peak of the current-symbol series is 24,156,978 shares on July 31, 2025, so the latest reading sits 44.5% below the peak; year over year it is down 41.8% from 23,031,102 shares on September 15, 2025, and since the June 30 settlement (16,820,108 shares) it is down 20.3% — the borrow shrank across the same quarter in which institutions added 81,315,356 reported shares. The first reading under the current symbol, 11,067,959 shares on January 31, 2025, is also the series minimum, and it sits close to the old symbol's final reading — the borrow crossed the ticker change intact; what changed afterwards is that it roughly doubled into July 2025 and has since halved back.
The recent settlements run 15,930,938 on July 15, then 14,511,033, 13,659,453, 12,846,262 and 13,406,927 — a borrow stepping down through the summer before a small uptick in the latest print. Set beside Lens 2, the quarter's geometry is unusual for this series: reported institutional shares rose 22.64% while the borrow fell 20.3% from the June settlement to mid-September.
The gap, stated plainly
The registers describe a company the retail conversation found again in October, after a June quarter its institutions had already voted on with filings. The tracked superinvestors held 7,134,950 shares at June 30 — two holders, one of them a new Third Point position of 2,558,943 shares at a 4.16% weight, the other a Tiger Global position increased 14.4% to 4,576,007 shares — having grown 78.37% in a quarter when the price rose 26.3%. The full market moved the same way at larger scale: 1,081 filers, up 104, holding 440,416,677 reported shares, up 81,315,356. The 5% register printed eight filings: the largest Vanguard row went from 12.45% to zero and a sister entity appeared at 7.73%, BlackRock's row rose from 5.2% to 7.1%, and T. Rowe Price's eased from 8.6% to 7.4%. Insiders, across 181 parsed filings, have recorded no open-market purchase at all — zero — against $102,097,670.87 of sales by eight sellers, $52,574,221.81 of it in the last 90 days. Congress registers nothing in either chamber. And the borrow, at 13,406,927 shares under the current symbol, is 44.5% below its July 2025 peak and down 20.3% since the June settlement. One plausible reading is that the registers run on different clocks and different mandates: benchmark institutions and two tracked managers spent the June quarter accumulating a stock its own insiders have only ever sold in the parsed record, short sellers spent the same period leaving, and the October retail attention belongs to none of these filings yet, because the insider tape is the only one of them that can see October at all. 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 7,134,950 shares at June 30 across two holders, one of them new. Whether Third Point's 2,558,943-share position grows, holds or disappears in its second quarter on the register is the whole lens.
- 2. A first insider purchase in the parsed record. The record holds zero open-market purchases across 181 filings, against 196 sales. Any P-code print — one buyer, any size — would break the record's single direction; continued sales would extend a run already at $102,097,670.87.
- 3. Whether the full market's filer growth holds. The broad register added 104 net filers and 81,315,356 reported shares in the June quarter while the price rose 26.3%. A second such quarter would widen the split with the insider tape; a reversal would close it.
- 4. Whether the borrow keeps shrinking. Short interest under the current symbol fell 20.3% from the June settlement to September 15, after peaking at 24,156,978 shares in July 2025. A return toward that peak would change this lens's direction; a fall below the series minimum of 11,067,959 would extend it.
- 5. A first congressional print in either chamber. The congressional register holds no Block record at all. Any row — purchase or sale, House or Senate — would give this lens its first content.
Until one of those prints, the record describes a stock held by two of our 83 tracked superinvestors — 7,134,950 shares after a 78.37% one-quarter increase built on a new Third Point position — whose full market added 104 filers and 22.6% more reported shares in the same quarter, whose insiders have bought nothing in the parsed record against $102,097,670.87 of sales, whose congressional register is blank, and whose borrow has fallen 44.5% from its peak under the current symbol while retail attention returned.
Related reading: Four of 83: Berkshire Hathaway Exited Constellation Brands in Q2, and the Cohort Cut 16.5% — Filing Tape #35; One of 83: The Superinvestors Cut Marvell 99.7% in the Quarter It Tripled — Filing Tape #34; Zero of 83: The Superinvestors Aren't in IREN — Filing Tape #1. Block's own page: Block, Inc. (XYZ) 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; Block identified by CUSIP 852234103. Two distinct managers hold long positions totalling 7,134,950 shares; both reported rows are long (no put or call rows); directions are one increased and one new, with no decreased or unchanged rows, and the collection's exit lists contain no row for this CUSIP. Quarter-to-quarter cohort totals (4,000,000 shares at March 31 across one filing row; 7,134,950 shares at June 30 across two filing rows; change +78.37%) are from the site pipeline's holdings files on the same CUSIP basis in both quarters, and the pipeline's second-quarter total matches the EDGAR collection's long total exactly (difference of 0 shares and $0), so no collection difference needs reporting for this name. The single first-quarter row carries no manager name in the pipeline file; we attribute it to Tiger Global Management because its filer-accession prefix (0000919574) is the same prefix as Tiger Global's second-quarter row and because 4,576,007 / 4,000,000 − 1 = +14.4% reproduces the second-quarter row's own reported change field exactly. We do not rely on that attribution for any headline figure — the cohort totals stand on the CUSIP rows alone. Tiger Global's share of the cohort is 64.1% = 4,576,007 / 7,134,950.
- 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; 1,076 of the 1,081 reported long positions), and its figures match the backfill fixtures' by-CUSIP row for 852234103 exactly on holders, shares, reported value, prior holders and prior reported value. The by-ticker file's entered/exited fields (952 and 848, a net of +104 that matches the change in holder count) have no counterpart in the by-CUSIP aggregation, which does not publish them, so this audit does not rely on them. Reported-value caution: the aggregate value ($32,083,296,402 over 440,416,677 shares) implies ≈$72.85 per share against a June 30, 2026 close of $76.00 in our price file, a gap of −4.1%. 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 (181 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, no buyers, no officer purchases). Sale transactions total 196 across the record (1,338,398 shares, $102,097,670.87, eight sellers), 106 of them recorded as officer sales. In the year through October 2, 2026: zero purchases and 140 sales (1,124,731 shares, $87,500,087.65, seven sellers, 50 of them recorded as officer sales). In the 90 days through October 2, 2026: zero purchases and 76 sales (648,913 shares, $52,574,221.81, four sellers, 11 of them recorded as officer sales) across 35 filings. The site's insider aggregate (compiled as of October 11, 2026, 90-day window) reads zero purchases, 72 sales and $47,696,861.81 with four sellers and an empty last-buy field; its window ends nine days later than the full parse's and its aggregation differs, so its counts are not expected to equal the parse's 90-day figures, and both are printed here rather than blended. "No purchases" in this audit is scoped to this parsed record, whose 181 filings are the coverage stated here.
- 13D/G lens: full-parse SC 13D/G aggregation and parsed filings (8 filings matching CUSIP 852234103 and issuer CIK 1512673, four reporting persons: 2 SC 13G originals and 6 SC 13G/A amendments, no SC 13D filings), filings through August 14, 2026. The Vanguard Group's rows (56,149,057 shares at 10.11% as of May 30, 2025; 68,436,549 shares at 12.45% as of September 30, 2025; 0 shares at 0.0% as of March 13, 2026, filed March 26, 2026), Vanguard Capital Management's row (41,692,502 shares at 7.73% as of March 31, 2026, filed April 29, 2026), BlackRock's rows (29,075,247 shares at 5.2% as of March 31, 2025; 38,928,405 shares at 7.1% as of September 30, 2025) and T. Rowe Price Associates' rows (47,532,186 shares at 8.6% as of June 30, 2025; 39,734,450 shares at 7.4% as of June 30, 2026, filed August 14, 2026) are reported as filed. Each parsed filing carries a single reporting person, so there is no co-reporting duplication in these eight rows; no rows are summed anyway, because the aggregation's totalSharesReported field (321,548,396 shares) adds 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 — no Block record. The House aggregate (as of October 3, 2026) and the Senate aggregate (as of October 1, 2026) likewise carry no XYZ row, and we report that absence for each chamber rather than omitting the lens. Congressional disclosures report value ranges, so this lens records direction and counts only where records exist.
- Short interest lens: FINRA Equity Short Interest files (biweekly settlement dates), collected directly from FINRA's public distribution. Block changed its ticker from SQ to XYZ in January 2025; the SQ symbol's series covers 97 settlements from January 15, 2021 to January 15, 2025 (final reading 11,426,246 shares) and the XYZ symbol's series — the one published with this audit — covers 40 settlements from January 31, 2025 (11,067,959 shares, also the current-symbol minimum) to September 15, 2026. The maximum of the current-symbol series is 24,156,978 shares on July 31, 2025, so the latest reading of 13,406,927 shares on September 15, 2026 sits 44.5% below the peak ((13,406,927 / 24,156,978) − 1) and 41.8% below the September 15, 2025 reading of 23,031,102; the change from the prior settlement (12,846,262 shares on August 31, 2026) is +4.36%, and the change since the June 30, 2026 settlement (16,820,108 shares) is −20.3%. The latest row's prior-settlement field (12,846,262) matches the prior settlement file's reported figure exactly. FINRA publishes each settlement about two weeks after the fact. The share-count ratio (2.19%) uses the fundamentals file's shares-outstanding figure below.
- Fundamentals note: our fundamentals collection carries Block's revenue of $24,193,683,000 labelled fiscal 2025, its net income of $1,305,636,000 labelled fiscal 2025, and its assets of $39,549,887,000 labelled fiscal 2025 — 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 612,243,000 (as of December 31, 2025, sourced in the file to a weighted-average basic share count) and a file-computed market value of $46,861,079,781. The file's price for the name is $76.54 as of October 6, 2026; our daily-close file ends October 2, 2026 at $74.33, and we keep the two files' figures separate rather than blending them.
- Prices: our own daily-close file for Block through October 2, 2026 ($74.33 close, +14.2% year to date on that file; 252-session closing high $84.85 on August 27, 2026; 252-session closing low $49.09 on February 12, 2026; closes of $60.18 at March 31, 2026 and $76.00 at June 30, 2026, a second-quarter change of +26.3%; change from June 30 to October 2 of −2.2% ((74.33 / 76.00) − 1)). The drawdown from the 252-session closing high is −12.4%, and the latest close sits +51.4% above the 252-session closing low ((74.33 / 49.09) − 1). The file's history begins June 1, 2021 and carries the predecessor symbol's prices under the current symbol.
- Market context sources: AltIndex's meme-stock list as updated on the evening of October 10, 2026 (Block fourth by Reddit mentions over the prior 24 hours, 63 mentions, bearish sentiment flag, behind GameStop, AST SpaceMobile and Netflix), checked October 11, 2026; the run of October 2026 insider-sale reports covering director Anthony Eisen's repeated 6,000-share sales, each described as executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 plan (transactions dated October 2, 5, 7 and 9 among those reported), as carried by multiple financial outlets in the week to October 10, 2026 and checked October 11, 2026, summarised in our own words; and the analyst backdrop aggregated by MarketBeat (42 analysts, Moderate Buy consensus, average price target of $95.45; Robert W. Baird's target raised from $105 to $106 with an outperform rating on October 2, 2026), as published October 10, 2026 and checked October 11, 2026. Figures we could not confirm against two sources were left out.
- Block is in the GetCoattail stock-page universe: Block, Inc. (XYZ) stock page. Series data: xyz_lens_data.csv · xyz_short_interest_series.csv. Earlier audits: Constellation Brands · Marvell · 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 11, 2026: first publication.