Michael Burry ended his bets against the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 last quarter, but made a new bet against semiconductor stocks, his latest portfolio update showed on Tuesday.
Burry’s Scion Asset Management bought bearish put options on the SPDR S&P 500 and Invesco QQQ in the second quarter, but those positions were gone in his latest Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Scion did, however, buy puts on 100,000 shares of Blackrock’s iShares Semiconductor ETF with a notional value of $47 million. The ETF counts Nvidia – the graphics chip specialist whose share price has roughly tripled this year on the back of AI excitement – as its third-largest holding.
The value investor consolidated his firm’s portfolio last quarter. He slashed the number of positions from 33 to 13, more than halving their total value (excluding options) from $111 million to $44 million.
The Scion boss typically overhauls most of his portfolio every three months, so it is unusual that he increased his holdings in Euronav, Hudson Pacific Properties, Nexstar Media, Safe Bulkers, Star Bulk Carriers and Stellantis last quarter. He exited his other positions and reduced his bets on Crescent Energy and The Real Real. Notably, he bought Alibaba shares and Booking.com shares and puts.
Burry shot to fame after his huge bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble was chronicled in the book and film ‘The Big Short’. He’s also known for investing in GameStop long before the video game retailer became a meme stock in early 2021, and for betting against Elon Musk’s Tesla and Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation fund in recent years.
The Scion boss is known for his gloomy warnings and dire predictions. In the summer of 2021, for example, he sounded the alarm about the “biggest speculative bubble of all time in all things” and warned buyers of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that they were signing up for the “mother of all crashes”.
