Michael Burry ramped up his bets on a raft of stocks while slashing his number of holdings last quarter.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame pared down his portfolio from 25 positions to 16 in the three months ending in March, he revealed in a quarterly portfolio update on Wednesday. The total value of his holdings rose from about $95 million to about $103 million.
Eleven holdings survived the period, and the Scion Asset Management boss added to all of them. For example, he boosted his stake in Alibaba from 75,000 shares to 125,000, his JD.com bet from 200,000 to 360,000, and his Star Bulk Carriers wager from 250,000 to 400,000.
Burry also added five new holdings to his collection: Baidu, BP, First Solar, Sprott Physical Gold Trust, and Cigna. He also disposed of a bunch of stocks including Amazon, Alphabet, MGM Resorts, Toast, and Warner Bros. Discovery.
The Scion chief is best known for his monster wager against the mid-2000s housing bubble, which was immortalized in the book and movie “The Big Short.”
He also drew attention for investing in GameStop more than a year before it became a meme stock in early 2021. The frenzy around the video games retailer reignited this week after one of its biggest proponents, investor Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill, returned to social media after a yearslong hiatus.
Burry’s latest portfolio update didn’t feature any put options. The investor has previously held the bearish options on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes, Apple stock, a microchip ETF containing Nvidia, Elon Musk’s Tesla, and Cathie Wood’s flagship Ark fund.
The value investor is well known for his grave warnings and grim predictions about market crashes and economic catastrophes. For instance, he sounded the alarm on the “greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things” in the summer of 2021, and cautioned that buyers of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies would be caught in the “mother of all crashes.”
