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If you want to get in early, before Wall Street catches on, watch closely because something genuinely strange just happened. Michael Burry, the man the world knows for betting against the market, the guy who shorted the 2008 crash and got an Oscar-winning movie made about him, just did the opposite of everything he's famous for.
He's been quietly buying five stocks, not shorting them, not flipping them, accumulating them over time to hold for the long haul. And while everyone else pours trillions into AI, not one of these five is an AI company. So, why is one of the most famous short sellers alive suddenly buying and holding the stuff everyone threw away?
Let's break down all five one by one. So, why care what one investor does? Burry's fund, Scion Capital, returned 489.34% net of fees from 2000 to 2008, while the S&P 500 gained under 3%, and his subprime bet, the one from the movie, made $725 million for his investors. He's not always right, but now he posts every trade in real time, reasoning attached, so we're not guessing what he's thinking.
So, what's the trend Burry is betting against? In one word, AI. And to be clear, he's not saying artificial intelligence is fake. He's saying the money flooding into it has gotten completely out of control. Look at the numbers he points to from Apollo's chief economist. 87% of all venture capital funding is now going into AI.
Nearly half of all investment grade bond issuance is AI linked. And AI makes up 38% of high yield bond issuance. To put that in perspective, at the absolute peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999, broader tech funding hit 80% of all venture capital, and we are already past that today. And here's the part that should make you sit up.
Wall Street keeps insisting this time is different, that today's AI debt is somehow cleaner and safer. Burry's response is blunt. Debt always starts out clean. That's how it gets sold. He reminds everyone that over 100 billion dollars of supposedly safe debt from that 1999 frenzy got rated junk by 2002.
His verdict on the whole thing? It is just an asset bubble, plain and simple. Now, this is where the trillions come back into the story. When that much money, trillions of dollars, is crammed into one corner of the market, it doesn't just vanish when the bubble cools. It has to go somewhere. And history says it floods back into the exact companies everyone abandoned on the way up.
That's the whole game Burry is playing here. He's not trying to time the top of AI. He's positioning early in the names he thinks will catch that wave of money on the way back. And then holding them for years while it plays out. So, here's the play. While everyone crowds onto the AI side of the boat, Burry is buying the companies on the empty side.
The boring, old economy, international names that got dumped simply because they aren't an AI story. And the tool he uses to find them is something called the price-to-sales ratio. Don't let the name scare you. Think of it like a price tag that shows how much you're paying for every single dollar of stuff a company actually sells.
When that tag drops to a level you haven't seen in 10 years, one of two things is true. Either the company is genuinely broken, or the crowd just stopped paying attention. Burry is betting on the second one. And one more thing before we start, because it's the whole spirit of these picks. This is buy and hold investing, not fast trading.
Burry isn't flipping these for a quick bounce. He files them as long-term positions and sits on them for years, through the ugly stretches, waiting for the rest of the market to come around. He even openly admits some of these are still falling right now, and he's fine with that. Because getting in early almost always means buying before the recovery is obvious.
So, as we go through each one, keep that frame in mind. Cheap, durable business, bought early, held for the long run. And we're going to break down all five of his picks the exact same way, so you can judge them for yourself. First, what the company actually does in plain English. Second, why it fits Burry's thesis, why he thinks it's mispriced.
Third, the catalyst, the thing that could wake the stock back up. And fourth, the one big risk, because every single one of these has a real reason it's cheap. We'll count them down from number five all the way to the one stock Burry likes most. So, let's get into it. Kicking things off at number five is the most beaten up name on the entire list, Lululemon.
Yes, the yoga pants company. So, what does it do? Simple, it's a premium athletic wear brand, the company that basically invented the whole athleisure category. Pure physical retail, zero AI. And that, right there, is exactly why it fits Burry's thesis. When momentum traders are busy chasing AI, a brand that sells leggings is the first thing they throw overboard.
Its price-to-sales ratio has crashed all the way down to 1.29, which, for a brand that once commanded enormous growth premiums, basically means the market is now pricing it for permanent decline. And the stock reflects that fear. It has fallen 63% from its peak and is sitting near six-year lows, which is exactly where Burry stepped in, buying at about $120 a share.
So, what's the catalyst that could turn it around? Two things. First, fresh leadership. Heidi O'Neill, a 25-year Nike veteran, takes over as CEO in September. And second, international demand is still strong, with mainland China up 28% in the latest quarter. Now, let's look at the numbers, because they tell a mixed story.
In the fourth quarter, revenue technically rose 1% to $3.6 billion, but the US business actually shrank 1% and gross margin collapsed 550 basis points to 54.9%, thanks to tariffs and heavy discounting. Still, for the full year, revenue grew 5% to $11.1 billion. This is not a dying company. It's a stumbling one, which brings us to the one big risk.
Right now, Lululemon is being run by two interim co-CEOs. So, there's no permanent hand on the wheel until September. On top of that, founder Chip Wilson, who still owns around 9% of the company, is in a public proxy fight and has nominated his own slate of directors. Boardroom chaos plus shrinking US sales means this one could absolutely fall further before it recovers.
Burry's bet is that the brand is simply too strong to stay this cheap for long. At number four, we've got maybe the most extreme value bet of the entire group, PayPal. Now, you already know what it does. It's the digital wallet that moves money around online. But, here's a number that doesn't get enough attention.
PayPal processes more than $463 billion in payments every single quarter. That is a gigantic, humming financial machine. And yet, the market has basically given up on it. How given up? Burry bought in at around $44 a share. And at that price, PayPal trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of just 8.54.
For context, that's the kind of multiple you'd slap on a slow, sleepy utility company, not a global payments network. And that's the thesis fit in a nutshell. A profitable, cash-gushing business priced like it's already dead. So, what's the catalyst? A brand new CEO, Enrique Lores, who took over in March, is cleaning house.
He's executed a 20% workforce cut as part of a $1.5 billion savings plan. And the company just paid its first ever quarterly dividend of 14 cents. A clear signal that it's growing up from a hype stock into a value machine that returns cash to shareholders. The numbers here are a tug-of-war. In the first quarter, revenue of $8.35 billion rose 7% and beat estimates.
But, profitability disappointed. Operating margin shrank 182 basis points to 17.8%. Net income fell, and active accounts have flatlined at 439 million. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at 33.17 billion dollars. So, the top line is fine. It's the trend underneath that scares people. And that's the one big risk.
PayPal is getting attacked from every direction. Apple Pay, Stripe, and buy now, pay later apps. The deeper fear is that it's lower margin Braintree business keeps growing, while it's high margin checkout button stalls, slowly turning PayPal into a low margin middleman. Burry's counter is simple. At 8.5 times earnings, with that much cash flow, the bad news is already baked in many times over.
Coming in at number three is a stock that has absolutely nothing to do with AI, and that is the whole point. Zoetis. So, what does it do? It's the world's largest animal health company. Think vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests for both pets and livestock. And here's why that's interesting. It's about as recession-proof as a business gets.
People don't stop feeding their cattle or treating their sick dog just because the economy gets shaky. That stability is exactly why this stock used to trade at a premium. Not anymore. Its price-to-sales ratio has compressed to about 3.5, a steep discount after the stock fell from above $131 in February down to the $77 range, which is right where Burry bought, calling it a fat pitch, but warning, it's still coming in hot.
In plain English, he thinks it's cheap, but it might get cheaper before it turns. This is one to be patient with. So, what's the catalyst? While the US business slumped, international revenue jumped 17% to 1.149 billion dollars. On top of that, the company is sitting on a pipeline of more than a dozen potential blockbuster drugs.
It's acquiring Neogen's animal genomics business, and it just raised its dividend to a 53-cent quarterly payout. Now, the numbers, because this is where the market got spooked. In the first quarter, revenue of 2.3 billion dollars grew just 3% and missed expectations. Earnings landed at $1.53 a share, and US revenue fell 8% to 1.09 billion dollars.
Management blamed pet owners getting price sensitive and skipping vet visits. Still, for the full year, Zoetis did 9.5 billion dollars in revenue and 2.7 billion dollars in net income. The one big risk? That US weakness might not be so temporary. Management even cut full year guidance to a 9.82 billion dollar midpoint and cheaper generic drugs are starting to eat into its legacy products.
Burry's bet is that a short-term consumer pullback doesn't break a global leader in an industry people literally can't quit. At number two, we have the pick that might surprise you the most because it actually is a tech company. Adobe. The maker of Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere. The software practically every designer and creative on the planet uses.
So, why on earth is a tech stock sitting on a list of anti-AI bets? Because the market has decided AI is going to kill Adobe and it's punishing the stock as if that has already happened. The shares are down nearly 28% on the year and now trade at their cheapest valuation since 2018, back when Adobe was a third of its current size.
Burry built his position in two chunks, in the low 230s and then the low 250s. Here's the catalyst and it's a big one. The fear is wrong. Adobe isn't losing at AI, it's winning. Its AI-first revenue more than tripled in a single year. The board is so confident, it authorized a 25 billion dollar buyback that will shrink the share count by roughly 20% which mechanically boosts earnings for everyone who stays in.
And it just completed its acquisition of Semrush, bolting AI search optimization directly into its product line. And the numbers back the bull case. In the most recent quarter, Adobe brought in 6.40 billion dollars in revenue, beating estimates with earnings up 19% to 6.06 dollars a share. And it has over 850 million monthly active users.
For the full year, revenue hit $23.769 billion. This is a wildly profitable machine being priced like a sinking ship. So, what's the one big risk? Two things. The long-time CEO, Shantanu Narayen, just announced he's stepping down after 18 years, leaving a leadership gap at the worst possible moment.
And the disruption fear is genuinely real. Cheap AI tools could eventually make Adobe's pricey software optional. Burry's bet is that the market has confused facing a challenge with going out of business. And that brings us all the way to number one, the stock Burry likes most and the only one of the five he flat-out calls a clean long-term winner, Mercado Libre.
So, what is it? The easiest way to understand it, picture Amazon, PayPal, and a bank all rolled into one company, except built for Latin America instead of the US. It runs the biggest online marketplace in the region and through an arm called Mercado Pago, one of its biggest digital banks, too. And here's the thesis in Burry's own words.
The stock comes cheap precisely because it is not based in the United States and does not operate in the United States. As American money pours into domestic AI, a fast-growing international champion like this just gets ignored. The result, its price-to-sales ratio has dropped to 2.54, which is 74% below its 10-year median, and its price-to-earnings ratio of 43.58 sits 86% below its 10-year average.
A hyper-growth company on the clearance rack. Burry bought in the mid $1,500. Now, here's the catalyst. Except with Mercado Libre, it's less a single event and more a business that is simply on fire. In the first quarter, revenue hit $8.85 billion, up 49% in a year, its fastest growth in nearly 4 years.
Its banking arm now serves 83 million monthly users. It issued 2.7 million new credit cards in a single quarter, and its credit portfolio grew 87% to $14.6 billion. For For the full year 2025, net income was $1.997 billion. So, what's the one big risk? All that growth comes at a cost. The company is deliberately squeezing its own profits to fund expansion.
Its operating margin fell to just 6.9% and earnings actually missed with EPS of $8.23 against a $9.37 forecast. And that giant lending book is risky. If Latin American economies wobble, those loans could go bad fast. But this is the one Burry is most willing to wait years on because in his eyes, the business keeps winning while the price keeps falling.
So, let's zoom out and look at all five together. Lululemon, PayPal, Zoetis, Adobe, Mercado Libre. Retail, payments, animal health, software, and Latin American commerce. Notice what's missing? There isn't a single AI darling in the bunch. Burry himself described these as part of a mass whale fall happening away from the main spectacle.
And he pointed out that the exact same thing happened in 1999. The old economy and the international names got dumped so everyone could pile into the all-American bubble. That's the entire idea. Buy what the crowd threw away at prices it hasn't seen in years and then wait. But here's the honest part you have to sit with.
Burry is one of the sharpest contrarians alive and he is also frequently early and sometimes flat-out wrong. His timing can be off by years and in the market, being early feels exactly like being wrong. He even warned his own subscribers that some of these trades will take patience. These are his personal buys, not recommendations.
And every one of these companies has a genuine specific reason it's cheap. Missed earnings, shrinking margins, a CEO heading for the door, a proxy fight. Those problems are real. Burry's whole bet is that they're temporary, not terminal. And that's really the lesson here, whether or not you ever buy a single one of these.
The entire market is leaning hard in one direction right now, into one story. And one of the best contrarian investors of the last 25 years just leaned the other way, with real money and his own name attached. Getting in early on five beaten down names and settling in to hold them for years. You don't have to copy him.
You just have to understand the trade. Because the people history actually remembers are almost never the ones who followed the crowd. Just remember, none of this is financial advice. It's for educational purposes only, and what you do with your money is your call. But now you know exactly what Michael Burry bought, why he bought it, and why he's planning to hold.
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