What does Michael Burry's last 13F show?
Scion's last 13F shows eight lines with a reported value of $1,381.2m at 30 September 2025, of which $912.1m was a put position on 5 million Palantir shares. The 13F-HR information table was filed on 3 November 2025 and signed by Michael J. Burry as chief executive. It lists two put lines, two call lines and four share holdings, one of them a preferred share.
At 30 September 2025, of $1,381.2m reported: Palantir puts $912.1m; Nvidia puts $186.6m; Pfizer calls $152.9m; Halliburton calls $61.5m; Molina Healthcare $23.9m; Lululemon $17.8m; SLM $13.3m; Bruker preferred $13.1m. Source: Scion Asset Management Form 13F-HR, 30 September 2025; chart data (CSV). By our calculation, puts were 79.5% of reported value, calls 15.5% and shares 4.9%. The filing gives no strike price, expiry date or premium for any option.
A 13F covers only certain US-listed long positions at quarter end. It does not show short sales, options the manager has written, cash, bonds or private holdings, according to the SEC staff's Form 13F FAQ (questions 41 and 43). So the eight lines are not Scion's full portfolio.
Why are Burry's put "bets" so often misread?
Burry's put positions look enormous in a 13F because the form values an option at the market value of the shares it covers, not at what the option cost. Special Instruction 10 of Form 13F states that a manager must give the entries "in terms of the securities underlying the options, not the options themselves", and column 4 is market value. A put on 5 million Palantir shares therefore appears at 5 million times Palantir's closing price, $912.1m.
Burry said on X that he spent about $9.2m on roughly 50,000 Palantir puts giving the right to sell at $50 a share in 2027, as reported by Funds Society on 17 November 2025. That premium is about 1% of the 13F line, by our calculation. The most a put buyer can lose is the premium paid.
The same pattern appeared before. Scion's 13F for 30 June 2023 reported $1,736.8m, of which $1,625.4m was puts on 2 million shares each of the SPDR S&P 500 and Invesco QQQ funds. Neither line appeared in the 30 September 2023 filing. A 13F shows a snapshot at quarter end; it cannot show when an option was bought, sold or how much it cost.
For scale, Scion's Form ADV of 28 March 2025 reported regulatory assets under management of $154.9m in four accounts. The 30 September 2025 13F value was 8.9 times that figure, by our calculation, although the two dates differ.
Did Scion stop filing 13Fs in late 2025?
Yes: the 13F filed on 3 November 2025 is Scion's last, and its SEC registration shows as terminated with effect from 10 November 2025. The SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure record lists the firm as inactive. EDGAR's filing indexes for Scion Asset Management and its two related managers, Scion Asset Partners and Scion Capital Group, show nothing after 3 November 2025. No 13F exists for 31 December 2025 or any quarter of 2026, including 30 September 2026.
Advisers with $100m or more of regulatory assets generally register with the SEC, and the 13F duty applies to managers with at least $100m of 13F securities. Reuters reported on 13 November 2025 that the SEC database showed Scion's registration as "terminated" as of 10 November, and that Burry posted "On to much better things Nov 25th" on X (as syndicated by BNN Bloomberg).
Burry told investors in an October 2025 letter that he would liquidate the funds and return their capital by the end of the year, as reported by the Financial Times (via The National News Desk, 14 November 2025); Reuters reported the liquidation, citing a letter to investors (Hedgeweek, 14 November 2025). We could not fetch the letter itself, and published quotations of it differ, so we paraphrase it.
How often did Scion's 13F portfolio change?
Scion's 13F changed sharply from quarter to quarter: filings from December 2022 to September 2025 held between 7 and 33 lines. Across all 32 quarterly reports since its first, for 31 December 2015, the range is 1 line (30 June 2022) to 33 (30 September 2020 and 30 June 2023). There is no Scion 13F for the quarters from December 2016 to September 2018.
Lines per 13F: Dec 2022 9; Mar 2023 21; Jun 2023 33; Sep 2023 13; Dec 2023 25; Mar 2024 16; Jun 2024 10; Sep 2024 11; Dec 2024 13; Mar 2025 7; Jun 2025 15; Sep 2025 8. Source: Scion Asset Management 13F-HR filings on EDGAR; chart data (CSV). The December 2023 count uses the amended filing of 16 February 2024.
The mix by type moved just as much, by our calculation from the same tables:
| 13F date | Reported value | Puts | Calls | Shares |
|---|
| 30 Jun 2023 | $1,736.8m | 93.6% | 0.0% | 6.4% |
| 30 Sep 2023 | $99.0m | 55.6% | 0.0% | 44.4% |
| 30 Sep 2024 | $129.8m | 36.0% | 0.0% | 64.0% |
| 31 Mar 2025 | $199.2m | 93.4% | 0.0% | 6.6% |
| 30 Jun 2025 | $578.3m | 0.0% | 90.3% | 9.7% |
| 30 Sep 2025 | $1,381.2m | 79.5% | 15.5% | 4.9% |
The other six filings in the window held shares only. In March 2025 the puts were on Nvidia, Alibaba, PDD, JD.com, Trip.com and Baidu; three months later the filing was mostly calls on UnitedHealth, Regeneron, Lululemon, Meta, Estée Lauder, JD.com, Alibaba, ASML and VF Corp. Each quarter's value is driven by whichever option lines are open, so the totals are not comparable as a measure of fund size.
What was Michael Burry's 2005-2008 mortgage trade?
By mid-2005 Burry had bought credit default swaps, a form of default protection, on billions of dollars of subprime mortgage-backed securities and the bonds of financial companies, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report (January 2011, page 194) records this from its 18 May 2010 interview with him. It also notes a change of heart: he "had invested in homebuilder stocks in 2002".
Burry's own account is his New York Times article of 3 April 2010. He wrote that he began to worry about housing in 2003, and that in 2005 and 2006 he argued in letters to Scion Capital clients "that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007". He spread the swaps across six counterparties, avoided Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, and demanded daily collateral settlement.
The payoff came about two years after the positions were in place. Burry wrote: "During 2007, under constant pressure from my investors, I liquidated most of our credit default swaps at a substantial profit." He exited the rest by early 2008 and shut Scion Capital that year, adding that "it took everything I had to see these trades through to completion". To the FCIC he said: "There is an argument to be made that you shouldn't allow what I did."
Accounts of Scion Capital's yearly returns and of how it restricted investor withdrawals come mainly from Michael Lewis's book The Big Short and later summaries. We could not fetch the investor letters themselves, so this article uses none of those figures.
What has Burry told individual investors, and what do 13F copy trades miss?
In the documents we checked, Burry has published no allocation rule for individual investors; his 2010 article is about mortgage risk and policy, and his 13Fs describe a fund's positions. Since 23 November 2025 he has written Cassandra Unchained, a paid Substack newsletter; 110 of its 130 posts to 2 November 2026 were for paying subscribers only, and we did not review those. Positions discussed there are not SEC filings and cannot be checked against a 13F.
Copying Scion's filed positions faces four problems that the filings themselves reveal.
- Timing. A 13F can be filed up to 45 days after quarter end; Scion's September 2025 report came 34 days after the quarter.
- Turnover. The index puts of June 2023 were gone three months later, and the March 2025 puts had become mostly calls by June.
- Size. Option lines show the underlying shares, so a copier cannot tell from the filing whether a position cost $9m or $900m.
- Omissions. Short sales, written options, cash and non-US holdings do not appear.
For another manager whose 13F is dominated by options, see Paul Tudor Jones's portfolio, where puts were 40.8% of reported value at 30 June 2026.
What does a short or put position mean for crash risk and compounding?
A bought put held alone limits its loss to the premium before charges. At expiry its gross payoff is the positive difference between strike and underlying price, multiplied by the contract size; subtract the premium to measure the trade's result.
Before expiry its market value also depends on remaining time and volatility, so a 13F snapshot cannot establish the realised payoff. Burry's mortgage trade shows the timing problem. He bought protection by mid-2005 for a collapse he expected in the second half of 2007, and he had to keep the trade through pressure from his own investors.
The cost of waiting compounds like any other loss. As arithmetic, not Scion's actual cost: a position that loses 6% of capital in each of three years leaves 0.94 x 0.94 x 0.94 = 0.831 of the starting balance, a 16.9% fall, before any payoff arrives. A payoff that comes after investors have withdrawn helps only the capital still invested. A position that is right but early can still lower an investor's compounded wealth if it forces sales at the wrong moment.
For scale, $9.2m is 5.9% of the $154.9m of regulatory assets in Scion's March 2025 ADV, by our calculation; the dates differ, and the fund may have held other positions that the 13F does not show. Our analysis of annual put hedge budgets shows how a yearly premium drags on compounding, and Mark Spitznagel's tail hedging shows a manager who sizes protection as a small slice of a whole portfolio. How withdrawals during a fall lock in losses is covered in our guide to cash and withdrawals in a crash.
What does copio think of this portfolio?
Scion's 13F is evidence of disclosed positions at a date, not a record of its full risk or hedge performance. The $1.1bn put headline measures underlying shares, while premiums, strikes, expiry dates and offsets are largely absent from the filing.
Changes between quarterly filings cannot establish what paid within a crash or why a position was closed. Copio therefore draws a process lesson: measure a hedge's contract, cost and fit before judging its size or copying it. It does not grade Scion because the single stocks and options cannot be entered cleanly in the checker.
Three checks for your portfolio
- Separate the amount referenced from the amount at risk. For an option you hold, record the underlying, contract multiplier, number of contracts, premium paid, strike and expiry. Keep underlying notional and cash premium in separate columns. For a bought put held alone, the premium is the maximum loss before charges; that statement does not cover a short option or a financed multi-leg trade.
- Match protection to the exposure and the date you need it. Calculate the put's expiry payoff at several underlying prices, deduct the premium and compare it with the loss on the assets being protected. A put on one company does not guarantee a payoff when a different market falls, and protection expiring before a withdrawal date leaves a gap. For a portfolio crash replay, record which price, volatility and timing assumptions the result uses.
- Set a renewal budget before the first premium. Express annual premiums and trading costs as a share of the whole portfolio, then calculate several years with no payout. State when you would renew, resize or stop, and how proceeds would be used after a payoff. Our 6%-a-year example is an illustration of recurring cost, not Scion's measured insurance budget.
The put-option guide explains the payoff mechanics. Copio's supported-fund checker can explore the surrounding allocation; it cannot reconstruct missing option contracts from a 13F.
FAQ
What did Michael Burry's last 13F show?
Scion Asset Management's last 13F, for 30 September 2025 and filed on 3 November 2025, reported $1.38bn across eight lines. Puts on 5 million Palantir shares and 1 million Nvidia shares made up 79.5% of that value, calls on Pfizer and Halliburton 15.5%, and four share holdings 4.9%. Options are valued at the underlying shares, not at the premium paid.
Did Michael Burry bet $1bn against Palantir and Nvidia?
No filing shows that. The $1.1bn of puts in Scion's 13F is the value of the shares underlying the options, which the Form 13F instructions require. Burry said on X that he spent about $9.2m on roughly 50,000 Palantir puts with a $50 strike in 2027, as reported by Funds Society on 17 November 2025. The 13F line for those puts was $912.1m.
Is Scion Asset Management still registered with the SEC?
No. The SEC's adviser database shows Scion's registration as terminated with effect from 10 November 2025. Its last 13F was filed on 3 November 2025, and neither Scion nor its two related managers has filed on EDGAR since, as checked on 4 November 2026. Reuters and the Financial Times reported in November 2025 that Burry had told investors he would return their capital.
How did Michael Burry make money in the 2008 crisis?
By mid-2005 he had bought credit default swaps on billions of dollars of subprime mortgage-backed securities and the bonds of financial companies, according to the FCIC report and his own 2010 article. He expected the market to melt down in the second half of 2007. During 2007, under pressure from his investors, he sold most of the swaps at a profit, and he exited the rest by early 2008.
Can you copy Michael Burry's portfolio from his 13F?
Not reliably. A 13F is filed up to 45 days after the quarter, shows long positions only, values options at the underlying shares and omits strikes, expiries and premiums. Scion's holdings also changed sharply: its June 2023 index puts were gone by the next filing, and its June 2025 filing was 90.3% calls.
