Michael Burry, the founder of Scion Asset Management, has been one of the most successful and most controversial financial figures in the past couple of decades. But how would a hypothetical $1,000 investment in some of his positions have paid out this year?
Recently, the ‘Big Short’ investor came into the spotlight for his bets against big tech stocks, and he soon delisted his hedge fund from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In other words, Scion will no longer post public portfolio updates.
Fortunately, Burry disclosed a quarterly 13 Filing shortly prior, revealing some of his stakes, and he’s been quite vocal about what kind of stocks he’s not so confident about.
How a $1,000 Michael Burry portfolio would look today
This quarter, Burry has been especially critical of the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, singling out Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR), and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) as vastly overvalued and betting over $1 billion against the first two.
“Understating depreciation by extending useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings -one of the more common frauds of the modern era,” Burry wrote about AI stocks.
Conversely, the investor had a more bullish stance on Halliburton (NYSE: HAL), Lululemon (NASDAQ: LULU), and some healthcare companies, including Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) and Molina Healthcare (NYSE: MOH). Likewise, he had a position in Bruker Corp (NASDAQ: BRKR) and SLM (NASDAQ: SLM).
Assuming you invested $1,000 and split it evenly across these six stocks at the beginning of January, your returns would not have been that positive.
Namely, among the six companies, only Halliburton and SLM are in the green year-to-date (YTD), having seen modest gains of just about 1%. The remaining four, on the other hand, have witnessed immense losses.
Most notably, Lulu and Molina are both down nearly 45%, while Bruker has sunk approximately 18%.
Pfizer is doing a bit better, although it has still recorded a loss of more than 5.5% over the same period.
What would a $1,000 Michael Burry portfolio be worth now?
In total, since each of the six stocks had the same initial value of about $166 in our hypothetical situations, your total portfolio value at the time of writing would be the average of the six individual percentage returns, which implies an overall loss of approximately 18.5%. That is, your $1,000 Michael Burry portfolio would now be worth about $815.
Assuming you split your $1,000 across some companies Burry was critical of, say Nvidia, Palantir, and Oracle, your returns would’ve been quite different. Namely, NVDA and ORCL are up 37% and 19% YTD, respectively, while PLTR has gained an impressive 158%. That’s a gain of about $713, or roughly 71% overall.
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