Q4 2025 13F: Where Institutional Ownership Shifted

Every quarter, institutional managers with over $100 million in assets file a 13F report disclosing their equity holdings. Watching how those holdings change — not just which companies are held, but how many managers are moving in or out at the same time — is a different way of reading the market than following price or earnings alone.

Q4 2025 had some large swings driven by completed deals and company-specific news. A few of the patterns underneath those moves are worth looking at more closely.

When deals close, capital relocates

Several of the largest holder-count changes in Q4 came from acquisitions that closed during the quarter — and they illustrate how the acquirer and acquired tend to mirror each other in the ownership data.

Kellanova (KEL) was taken over by Mars on December 11, dropping from 863 institutional holders to nearly none. Interpublic Group (IPG) was absorbed into Omnicom on November 26, falling from 623 holders to almost zero. Mr. Cooper Group was acquired by Rocket Companies (RKT) in an all-stock deal that closed October 1 — nearly all of its 421 institutional holders exited as their shares converted into Rocket stock.

In each case, the acquirer's holder count moved in the opposite direction. Omnicom (OMC) gained 17% more institutional holders in the same quarter it absorbed IPG. Rocket Companies gained 48% more — a jump that, given the all-stock structure of the Mr. Cooper deal, likely reflects former Mr. Cooper holders now appearing as Rocket holders. The underlying ownership data is doing what you'd expect, but it's easy to misread Rocket's Q4 holder surge as purely organic institutional interest when much of it traces back to a single transaction.

Oracle and Fiserv: two different stories, same outcome

Oracle (ORCL) lost about 7% of its institutional holders in Q4 — a broad move across manager sizes, not a handful of large funds trimming. The reason became clearer on December 10, when Oracle reported fiscal Q2 2026 results: revenue came in at $16.1 billion against expectations of $16.2 billion, while the company announced it would spend $50 billion in capital expenditures for the year, up sharply from prior guidance. Free cash flow turned significantly negative for the third consecutive quarter. The stock fell roughly 11% on the day. Investors weren't necessarily souring on Oracle's long-term AI infrastructure positioning, but the combination of a revenue miss and an aggressive spending announcement prompted many to step back and reassess the near-term picture.

Fiserv (FISV) was a more acute situation. On October 29, the company reported Q3 2025 earnings that missed on both revenue and earnings per share, and then slashed its full-year EPS guidance by roughly 17%. The stock fell 44% in a single session — its worst day on record. The core issue was that Argentina's economic stabilization had removed a tailwind that had been contributing around 10 percentage points to Fiserv's organic growth in 2024; that contribution collapsed to near 2 points in 2025. By the time Q4 13F filings were filed, Fiserv had lost more than 20% of its institutional holder count, distributed broadly including among smaller managers.

Fixed-income ETFs approaching maturity

Three defined-maturity bond ETFs — iShares iBonds Dec 2025 Term (IBDQ), Invesco BulletShares 2025 Corporate Bond (BSCP), and iShares iBonds Dec 2025 Term (IBTF) — each lost close to all of their institutional holders as they reached their maturity dates by December 31. This is expected behavior for a product designed to wind down at a specific date. The more interesting question, as with the M&A exits, is where that capital moved next.

Semiconductors: a lot of names moving in the same direction

The most distinctive pattern in Q4 was the number of semiconductor and semiconductor-adjacent companies that gained institutional holders simultaneously. This wasn't one or two names — it was a broad cluster spanning memory, chips, equipment, optical interconnect, and storage:

• Micron Technology (MU) — +21%
• SanDisk (SNDK) — +39% (returned to independent trading in February 2025 after being spun out of Western Digital)
• Coherent (COHR) — +24%
• Teradyne (TER) — +22%
• Western Digital (WDC) — +18%
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) — +10%
• Lam Research (LRCX) — +8%
• Applied Materials (AMAT) — +7%
• Intel (INTC) — +6%
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) — +5%
• Broadcom (AVGO) — +3%

The individual percentages range from modest to meaningful. What stands out is that they all point the same way across parts of the supply chain that don't always move together. When interest in a theme is concentrated in one or two names, it can reflect a specific stock thesis. When it spreads across a dozen names in different sub-segments — and across institutions of many different sizes — it looks more like a shared view on where investment is heading.

Micron's case is the clearest data point: its data center revenue grew 137% year-over-year in fiscal 2025, driven by demand for High Bandwidth Memory used in AI accelerators. But the breadth of the semiconductor move in Q4 went well beyond memory.

Healthcare names gaining in parallel

Four major healthcare companies each grew their institutional holder base in Q4:

• Eli Lilly (LLY) — +6%
• Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) — +9%
• Merck (MRK) — +5%
• Amgen (AMGN) — +5%

None of these numbers is dramatic on its own. Four large, unrelated healthcare companies each seeing their holder base grow in the same quarter is a different picture than if only one had moved. Eli Lilly carries over $800 billion in aggregate institutional value — by far the largest healthcare position in the FilingFrog dataset — and still added 6% more holders in Q4.

Financial services

Several financial names saw meaningful holder growth outside of deal-driven activity:

• F&G Annuities & Life (FG) — +93%
• Morgan Stanley (MS) — +6%
• American Express (AXP) — +5%
• Citigroup (C) — +6%

New companies in the dataset

Three spinoffs appeared in 13F filings for the first time in Q4: QNITY Electronics (spun out of DuPont), Solstice Advanced Materials (from Honeywell), and Magnum Ice Cream (from Unilever). Each picked up hundreds of new institutional holders in their first quarter as public independents — QNITY and Solstice each crossed 900.

Spinoffs create a clean starting point: every institution building a position is doing so from zero at the same time. How that initial holder base evolves over the next few quarters is usually more informative than the opening snapshot.

All of the data referenced here is drawn from Q4 2025 13F filings, comparing institutional positions as of December 31, 2025 against September 30, 2025. Every company, manager, and quarter-over-quarter change in this analysis is available to explore on FilingFrog — through individual security pages, manager profiles, or the full quarterly change dataset.