- Michael Burry bolstered his bets on three Chinese tech companies last quarter.
- The “Big Short” investor raised his stakes in Alibaba, Baidu, and JD.com but also hedged the wagers.
- Burry didn’t add any new names to his stock portfolio but exited a couple in the period.
Michael Burry doubled down on three of China’s biggest technology companies last quarter, boosting his stakes while carefully hedging his bets.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame bolstered his Alibaba position by 29% to 200,000 shares worth around $21 million at the end of September, a quarterly portfolio filing revealed on Thursday. He also purchased bearish put options on almost 169,000 of the e-commerce giant’s shares with a nominal value of about $18 million.
The Scion Asset Management boss doubled his JD.com stake to 500,000 shares worth $20 million at quarter end, and purchased put options on the same number of shares.
Similarly, he raised his Baidu position by two-thirds to 125,000 shares, worth a little over $13 million on September 30, and bought put options on around 83,000 shares of the company.
The combined nominal value of the three put positions was $43.6 million. That’s equal to just over half the value of the rest of the stock portfolio, which grew 64% in the period to just over $86 million despite Scion trimming its number of non-option positions from 10 to eight.
Chinese stocks soared in late September after the government pledged to revitalize economic growth with a sweeping stimulus package, but have slumped since then as details remain sparse.
Burry didn’t take positions in any new stocks last quarter, but he added to his wagers on Molina Healthcare, Shift4 Payments, and Olaplex. He also exited BioAlta and Hudson Pacific Properties, more than halved his stake in TheRealReal, and cut his position in American Coastal Insurance by 60%.
The value investor shot to fame after making a massive bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble, which was immortalized in the book and movie “The Big Short.”
He’s also notable for investing in GameStop and penning letters to its directors more than a year before it became a meme stock in early 2021.
Burry has previously bought bearish put options on the S&P 500, Nasdaq, Apple, Tesla, Cathie Wood’s flagship Ark fund, and a microchip ETF containing Nvidia.
The value investor hasn’t been shy about issuing dire warnings and dour predictions about market crashes and economic calamities. He rang the alarm on the “greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things” in the summer of 2021, and warned buyers of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies they would suffer the “mother of all crashes.”
