Concentration · Nektar Therapeutics
Two hundred and forty-six institutions reported holding Nektar at the end of June. For most of them it is a rounding error. For eleven, it is a meaningful part of everything they manage. One of the eleven exists specifically to trade the outcomes of lawsuits.
HolderBook · from Q2 2026 Form 13F, 13D and 13G filings
A 13F tells you what a manager owns. It does not tell you whether they care. A $200 million position inside a trillion-dollar index book is an accounting consequence; the same $200 million inside a $5 billion fund is a decision somebody had to defend in a meeting.
So the useful question about Nektar is not who owns it. BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Geode all roughly tripled their holdings last quarter, and none of them formed a view about anything. The question is who owns it as a proportion of their own book. That list is short, and it looks nothing like the list ranked by dollars.
Ranked by what the position represents inside the manager’s own portfolio, not by dollars. Every figure is from the Q2 2026 filings.
Two percentages sit side by side on each card and they point in opposite directions. Share of their book is how much of the manager’s own portfolio this one position is. Share of Nektar is how much of the company they own. A fund can have an enormous share of the first and a trivial share of the second, and the difference between those two numbers is the difference between conviction and control.
A microcap activist value fund run by Aron English. Nearly a fifth of everything 22NW manages sits in this one biotech, and it has sat there for five straight filings without a share bought or sold. Note that it is a huge share of 22NW and under 1% of Nektar: conviction, not control.
A healthcare long/short shop founded in 2008 by W. Lawrence Hawkins, with five employees on its own filings. Nektar is reported to be its single largest position. Adding modestly rather than chasing.
Arrived three quarters ago and has almost doubled the position since. One name now accounts for better than a twelfth of the entire book.
Brand new this quarter, and straight in at close to 5% of the book. Not a toe in the water.
Held it five quarters and nearly tripled the position in the most recent one. The longest-standing holder on this list to still be adding aggressively.
The one that matters. Two Seas describes its own strategy as investing in events with a legal or regulatory catalyst. It is the second-largest holder by value, it added 57.8% last quarter, and on 14 August it told the SEC it owns 9.1% of Nektar itself. Note the two percentages either side of this paragraph: a middling slice of Two Seas, a very large slice of Nektar.
Biotechnology Value Fund, the specialist most often found early in situations like this. Trimmed 6.6% last quarter while still filing a 13G/A on the same day as Two Seas, confirming it owns 7.1% of the company.
Five quarters in, and close to doubled last quarter. Another healthcare specialist rather than a generalist.
Small in dollars, large in proportion. A quarter more of it than three months ago.
More than doubled the position last quarter from an already meaningful base.
The dissenter, and the most interesting name on the list. Great Point cut its position by almost half. Its co-founder David Kroin left to start Deep Track Capital, and Deep Track opened a brand-new $20.9M position in the very same quarter. Same lineage, opposite conclusion, ninety days apart.
Nektar sued Eli Lilly in August 2023 in the Northern District of California, accusing its former partner of botching the statistical analysis of early trials of rezpegaldesleukin and then, after Lilly acquired a competing eczema drug with its purchase of Dermira, of engineering the programme’s failure. Lilly denies it, says the termination followed the drug missing its primary endpoint in lupus, and filed a counterclaim in March 2024.
Jury selection was originally calendared for 27 October 2025 before Judge James Donato in San Francisco. The pre-trial conference slipped past 11 December on account of the government shutdown, and the docket now carries a trial date of 10 September 2026, a fortnight from the filings described here and three years and a month after the complaint was filed.
Which puts the Q2 buying in a particular light. Two Seas added 57.8% and crossed to 9.1% of the company in the quarter immediately before a trial date. Apeiron opened at 4.77% of its book. Stonepine nearly tripled. None of that proves anything about what any of them expect. But the timing is not accidental, and it is the sort of thing a quarterly filing shows and a headline does not.
There is a second case, pointing the other way. In March 2026 a securities class action was filed against Nektar itself over the REZOLVE-AA alopecia trial, which missed statistical significance in December 2025. The company attributed that shortfall to four patients who should never have been enrolled. The class period runs from February to December 2025.
The most telling thing in the filings is not the buying. It is the disagreement inside it. Great Point Partners cut its position by 44.7% last quarter. Deep Track Capital, founded by Great Point’s own co-founder David Kroin, opened a $20.9 million position in the same three months.
Meanwhile BVF, one of the most experienced biotech specialists on the register, trimmed 6.6% while simultaneously filing to confirm it still holds 7.1% of the company. Citadel cut 68.9% and Jane Street 92.6%, though both are market makers and their share counts move with flow rather than conviction.
| Quarter | Holders | Value | Opened | Added | Trimmed | In options |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q2 2026 | 246 | $2.7B | 77 | 98 | 43 | 6.9% |
| Q1 2026 | 216 | $2.0B | 66 | 74 | 48 | 5.5% |
| Q4 2025 | 182 | $796.2M | 55 | 49 | 43 | 8.0% |
| Q3 2025 | 156 | $943.9M | 68 | 43 | 28 | 13.1% |
| Q2 2025 | 113 | $265.8M | 111 | 0 | 4 | 25.5% |
Nektar carried out a reverse split in mid-2025. Share counts before and after that quarter are not directly comparable, and the apparent turnover in Q2 2025, where 111 positions read as new, reflects the identifier change rather than 111 managers arriving at once.
Institutions report 36,308,998 shares against 34,142,994 outstanding, which comes to 106.3%. That is not institutions owning more of the company than exists; it is an adviser and a sub-adviser both reporting the same shares, and both being counted. It does mean, though, that essentially the entire float is spoken for by somebody who files with the SEC.
Whatever the court decides, it will be decided in front of an unusually attentive audience.
Figures are what filers reported to the SEC for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, corrected for amendments, plus 13D and 13G filings through 14 August 2026. The trial date is taken from the court docket in Nektar Therapeutics v. Eli Lilly & Co, 3:23-cv-03943 (N.D. Cal.). Share of book is the position’s value against the total value that manager reported on the same form, so it covers disclosed US equity positions only and not shorts, bonds, foreign listings, private holdings or cash. Strategy descriptions are taken from the managers’ own published material. Nothing here is investment advice, and nothing here asserts a view on the merits of either lawsuit.