Last quarter, an SEC filing revealed that Michael Burry Apple bet is against the company, and he loaded up on other equities like Meta, Alphabet, and Discovery.
Scion had only six equities at the end of December. The hedge fund sold off all but Bristol-Myers Squibb in the fourth quarter, bringing in Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Discovery among other things.
The slew of purchases helped to raise Big Short star’s company Scion’s US equities (excluding options) value by 122 percent to $165 million. The fund’s largest long bets at the end of March were a $22 million position in Bristol-Myers Squibb, a $19 million share in Booking Holdings and Discovery, and a $18 million stake in Alphabet.
Michael Burry Apple bet: Shorts Apple, favors Alphabet
It’s worth noting that Burry predicted Apple would be a stock worthy of Warren Buffett in 1999, about 17 years before the Berkshire Hathaway CEO invested in the firm. Berkshire Hathaway’s stock portfolio contains Apple as the company’s most significant holding, and Buffett recently stated that he boosted his firm’s position during the previous quarter. As of March 31, Burry’s Scion Asset Management had bearish put options on 206,000 Apple shares. The iPhone maker’s stock price has increased by about fourfold since 2019, but it has dropped 16% over this three-month period even though starting the year pretty strong. This could be the cause for Michael Burry Apple bet.
He is most recognized for betting against Elon Musk’s Tesla and Cathie Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation fund last year, so Michael Burry Apple bet isn’t something new. He also called and profited from the mid-2000s housing bubble’s collapse, paving the road for meme-stock mania by investing in GameStop, and penning letters to the company’s board.
Last year, Burry named Tesla, GameStop, bitcoin, dogecoin, Robinhood, and the white-hot US housing market as cases of speculative exuberance in financial markets.
Last year, the Scion president issued a dire warning about “the greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things,” urging investors to avoid meme stocks and cryptocurrencies before the “mother of all crashes.”
Scion chief slashed his US stock portfolio down from more than 20 holdings to just six in the third quarter of 2021, cutting its total value (excluding options) from almost $140 million to $42 million. In the fourth quarter, Scion chief swapped three of his remaining six investments, boosting his portfolio’s worth to $74 million at the end of December.
