원문 보기
Michael Burry just disclosed something most investors completely missed. The man who saw 2008 before anyone else, the guy from The Big Short, is buying two stocks right now that are trading for less than the cost of a coffee. We're talking $4 and $5 a share on the OTC pink sheets. And by his own math, these two could be worth $15, $20, even $40 if one specific catalyst hits.
This is one of the highest conviction setups Burry has put in writing in years, and almost nobody outside his Substack is paying attention. Before we get into the trade, you need to understand the source. made returns of 489% net of fees between 2000 and 2008 betting against the housing bubble. Christian Bale played him in The Big Short.
That actually happened. And for almost two decades, he kept quietly running money at Scion. Sometimes early, sometimes wrong on timing, but always looking for the trad nobody expected. He shut Scion down completely, t $39 a month or $379 a year. What that means is huge. For the first time in his career, Burry isn't filing his trades with the SEC on a 45-day delay.
He's publishing them himself in real time with the full reasoning attached. And on March 26th, 2026, he published one of his most important posts ever. It's titled The Toxic Twins Recurrence. It's about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And in it, he tells subscribers something almost nobody else on Wall Street is saying right now.
He's been buying these two stocks aggressively all the way down and at current prices he sees one of the most asymmetric setups he's ever modeled. Let me break down exactly what's happening, why he's buying, and what the upside math actually looks like. Quick refresher for anyone who doesn't follow this stuff closely.
Fannie Mae, ticker FNMA, and Freddie Mac, ticker FMCC, are the two giant mortgage finance companies that effectively underwrite the American housing market. Together, they back roughly 70% of all new home loans in the country. They're not small. They're systemically important. Back in 2008, both companies blew up alongside the subprime mortgage market.
The federal government took them into something called conservatorship, basically pumping in cash to keep them alive in exchange for senior preferred shares and warrants on 79.9% of the common stock. Both companies were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. They've been trading on the OTC pink sheets ever since.
For 17 years, the common stock has been a graveyard for hedge funds. Bill Ackman, John Paulson, Bruce Berkowitz, all of them piled in at various points. All of them got stuck. The trade became a punchline. A federal jury did award shareholders a combined $612 million in 2023 over the so-called net worth sweep.
But that was barely a rounding error compared to the profits Treasury had already pulled out of these companies. But here's where it gets interesting. The companies themselves are wildly profitable. Fannie Mae just reported $3.7 billion for Q1 2026 and net worth of $112.7 billion, which marked their 33rd straight quarterly profit.
Freddie Mac added than $10 billion in net income in 2025. Combined, these two cash machines are sitting on over $183 billion in retained book equity. They're guaranteeing more than $4 trillion in mortgages, and the common stock trades for $5. That's the setup Burry is staring at. And on March 26th, 2026, with FNMA at $5 and $14, and FMCC at $4 and $69, he wrote his toxic twins recurrence post, and confirmed publicly that he's been buying.
In December 2025, Burry first told subscribers he held sizable positions in both names, projecting in his earlier piece that the shares could trade at 1.5 to two times book value once released from conservatorship. Then the stocks fell, and kept falling. They're now down roughly 70% over the past 6 months.
And on March 26th, he came clean about exactly what he'd been doing during the bloodbath. He admitted he had been buying the whole way down. When the stocks fell to the $6 to $7 range, he bought more. And when they collapsed into the fours, he bought even more. This is not a passive holder talking himself into a bottom.
This is one of the most disciplined value investors of the last 25 years averaging down aggressively in size on two stocks that almost the entire institutional world has written off as dead capital. That alone tells you something. Burry is famously patient and famously paranoid about losing money. He didn't accumulate this position because he's hopeful.
He accumulated it because the math, in his view, has become impossible to ignore. So, what does the math actually look like? This is where the Toxic Twins Recurrence post gets genuinely wild. Burry built two valuation tables, one for Fannie and one for Freddie. He runs them through a matrix of variables, where the eventual IPO price is, what happens to the junior preferred shares, and crucially, how much of the Treasury's senior preferred stock gets canceled.
And the outputs across the realistic scenarios are stunning. In his base case, where the Treasury cancels most of its senior preferred claim and the IPO price is reasonably, Fannie Mae common stock is worth somewhere between $13 and $17 per share. From a current price of $5, that's roughly a three times.
Freddie Mac in the same scenario lands between $16 and $25 per share. From $4 and change, that's a four times to six times. In his bullish scenarios, where the IPO price is high and the Treasury writes down even more of its senior claim, the numbers go absolutely vertical. Fannie scenarios reach into the mid-30s.
Freddie scenarios push above 40. From current prices, that is a seven times to a 10 times on the common stock of two of the biggest financial institutions in the United States. Not on a meme stock, not on a small cap moon shot, on companies that already exist, are already profitable, and are already guaranteeing trillions of dollars in mortgages.
This is the kind of asymmetric setup Burry has been hunting for his entire career. And in the post, he doesn't hedge the language. He explicitly puts in writing that even partial cancellation of the senior preferred, say 25%, still produces mid-teens returns for Fannie and high teens to low 20s for Freddie from current prices.
By the way, billionaire Bill Ackman, whose firm Pershing Square is the largest single common shareholder with more than 210 million shares combined, came out a few days after Burry's post and said publicly that Fannie and Freddie are stupidly cheap and could be a 10 times. The next trading day, FNMA and FNC C ripped with intraday gains of 51% and 47% respectively.
The two best-known names in deep value investing are pointing at the same thing at the same time. That doesn't happen often. Now, the entire trade hinges on one thing. Burry says it explicitly. It's not the IPO, it's the senior preferred stock. When the government rescued Fannie and Freddie in 2008, it didn't just hand over cash.
It received senior preferred shares with a liquidation preference that grows over time. As of early 2026, that combined preference sits north of $360 billion. Burry's own framing of it is brutal. He calls Treasury's senior preferred a financial Thor's hammer hanging over the common stockholders. As long as that hammer exists at full size, the common is technically subordinate to a $360 billion claim.
That's the bear case, but here's what Burry argues. The original bailout was about $192 billion. Through the so-called net worth sweep in the 2000s, the GSEs sent over $300 billion in profits back to Treasury, meaningfully more than the bailout itself. By any reasonable interpretation, taxpayers got their money back plus interest plus a healthy premium.
The senior preferred is now sitting on top of that, growing every quarter, mostly as a political tool. Treasury can do one of three things. They can keep the senior preferred at full size, which suppresses common stock value indefinitely. They can convert part of it to common stock and IPO into the conversion.
Or, they can simply cancel a chunk of it as part of the recapitalization. And here's the thing, even partial cancellation produces multi-bagger returns from current prices. The full cancellation scenario is where the math goes parabolic. Burry is not betting on full cancellation. He's betting that some kind of structural resolution becomes inevitable.
And right now, two specific catalysts are forcing the issue. Catalyst one is political. FHFA director Bill Polte is a Trump loyalist, not a regulatory ideologue. He's named himself chairman of the boards of both Fannie and Freddie. And in early 2026, he told CNBC on the record that the FHFA had 20 to 30 different items presented to the president and expected a decision in the next month or two.
That's not vague boardroom language. That's a regulator publicly putting an IPO on the president's desk. Then you have Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent is a bond market operator, a rates guy, and his stated priority is mortgage rates staying low. He's said publicly that the most important metric for any release of Fannie and Freddie is whether mortgage rates would go up.
What Burry points out, and almost nobody else is highlighting, is that Bessent and Trump don't actually need to do an IPO to unlock value. They just need to make a clear announcement on the senior preferred stock and uplist the shares back to the New York Stock Exchange. That alone could re-rate the equity.
In fact, Trump already directed Fannie and Freddie to purchase $200 billion in agency mortgage bonds earlier in 2026 to push down mortgage rates. The administration is already using these companies as active policy tools. Privatizing them or restructuring the senior preferred isn't a fringe idea. It's already on the operating table.
Catalyst two is the part that turns this whole thing into a ticking clock, and it's the part that gets less coverage than it should. The Treasury, in addition to its senior preferred, also holds warrants to purchase 79.9% of the common stock of each company. Those warrants have a hard expiration date.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, those warrants expire on September 7th, 2028. If Treasury doesn't act before that date, the federal government literally walks away from a stake that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars at the right IPO price. Think about what that means. The single largest motivated seller in this entire trade is the United States government.
And the US government has roughly 30 months to harvest a multi-hundred billion-dollar position or watch it vaporize. That is not an ordinary corporate timeline. That is a hard, statute-driven deadline that no administration of any political party can ignore. It's a forcing function on the entire structure.
Burry, in the post, is fully aware of this. He himself believes the IPO is now a 2027 proposition at best, citing the inflationary impact of the Iran war and the lukewarm reception Wall Street gave the administration's initial pitch. But pushing the IPO from 2026 into 2027 doesn't change the September 2028 deadline.
If anything, it compresses the runway and makes a forced action more likely, not less. Now, here's the part you really need to sit with. Burry is not buying these stocks because he thinks the housing market is healthy. He literally thinks housing is in for a long winter. He is not buying them because he thinks the macro is great.
He's been writing for months that inflation is re-accelerating, mortgage rates are sticky, and the Iran war is layering geopolitical risk on top of everything. He's not buying for the macro. He's buying despite the macro. He's buying because the math at $5 is absurd, because two of the most profitable financial institutions in the country are trading at a tiny fraction of book value, because the federal government has a hard 2028 deadline and is openly preparing the runway, because the senior preferred stock is a political instrument, not a real economic one.
And the politics now point toward resolution. And because his own valuation tables show base case three times to five times and bull case seven times to 10 times from current prices. With even the partial cancellation scenario printing mid-teens fair value. Now, fair warning. This is one of the most legally and politically complex trades in modern markets.
The stocks trade on the pink sheets. The bid-ask spreads are wide. The headlines move them double-digit percentages on a single tweet. Investors like Bill Ackman have been waiting on this thesis for over a decade. Burry himself is upfront that this is neither an automatic nor a necessarily quick win.
Anybody looking at FNMA and FMCC needs to understand that political and regulatory risk is the entire game. But the asymmetry is what makes this notable. The downside, if nothing happens, is a stock that already trades at a deep discount to book value with double-digit book value growth quietly compounding underneath it.
The upside, if something does happen on Burry's own numbers, is multi-bagger territory. That's why this matters even if you never touch FNMA or FMCC. Because what Burry is publicly modeling in real time on his own Substack is one of the cleanest expressions of his entire investing philosophy. Find the asset that everyone has given up on, where the math has quietly turned, and where a hard catalyst is closer than the market believes.
He did it in 2008 with subprime mortgages. He's doing it again in 2026 with the very companies that crashed during 2008 in the first place. The toxic twins bought at $4, modeled at 15 to $40 with a deadline in September 2028. The man who shorted housing is now the most famous bull on the two largest housing companies in the country and he is buying right now.
댓글 0