저자: MichaelBurry · 외국인
요약 보기
마이클 버리가 AI 인프라 랠리에서 소외된 페이팔, Sprouts, 몰리나헬스케어, 패니메이·프레디맥, 브루커 전환우선주, 게임스탑을 매수했다고 설명. 페이팔은 Venmo 성장과 높은 잉여현금흐름, Sprouts는 실적 상회 후 자사주 매입, 게임스탑은 순현금 대비 시총 저평가, 몰리나는 일회성 손상차손 영향이라 주장. AI 자본지출 사이클이 과열돼 시장 조정이 올 수 있다고 보고 현금성 자산과 방어적 포지션을 선호. 자막 기준 한국 자산에 대한 발언은 없음.
다듬은 글
Over the past two decades, Michael Burry built a track record by hunting for market bubbles nobody else could see. Most notably, predicting the 2008 housing crash before the rest of Wall Street. His role in the 2008 crisis made him a prominent figure in finance and led to his portrayal by Christian Bale in the movie The Big Short.
In late 2025, Burry shifted his strategy. He shut down Scion Asset Management entirely, choosing to stop managing client money to focus exclusively on his own capital. By moving to a private family office model, he was no longer required to file delayed trade reports with the SEC. Instead, he began publishing his moves and his full rationale live on his Substack.
Burry is now betting his personal fortune on six specific stocks the rest of the market has discarded. To see what he expects to happen over the next 12 months, we have to look at the logic behind these April 2026 trades. On April 15th, Burry opened a position in PayPal. After the company missed its fourth quarter 2025 earnings estimates,
the stock dropped 19% in a single day, part of a total 84% collapse from its historical high. The prevailing narrative on Wall Street was that the business was losing ground to platforms like Apple Pay. This chart contrasts that price collapse with the actual business performance. While the red line tracks the stock drop, the underlying data shows Venmo growing revenue by 20% to $1.7 billion dollars.
The platform processing $1.8 trillion in total payment volume, and the company generating $6 billion in annual free cash flow. Burry sees a parallel to 1963, when American Express was caught in a massive scandal involving fraudulent salad oil holdings. The stock crashed and the market assumed the company was finished.
Warren Buffett realized that despite the scandal, the core payment network remained intact. He bought heavily and the investment became a cornerstone of his career. Burry is applying that same logic to PayPal. At today's prices, the market is treating the company like a dying business, even though it's cash flow metrics suggest a highly resilient operation.
On April 24th, Burry increased his position in Sprouts Farmers Market following a 50% drawdown in the stock. Investors had sold off the company on the assumption that it was losing a price war with Walmart during a period of high inflation. But the demographic data told a different story. Sprouts serves an upper-income shopper base focused on organic products, a group that has proven significantly more resilient to consumer slowdowns than the average big-box retail customer.
Just 5 days after Burry's trade was published, Sprouts reported earnings that beat analyst estimates. Management raised their full-year guidance and authorized a share buyback, causing the stock to jump 17% in a single day. This follows Burry's standard setup. He buys a company with strong fundamentals while it is being actively avoided by the market, then waits for a specific earnings event to correct the valuation.
Burry's recent purchase of GameStop is also being widely misunderstood. This trade has nothing to do with the retail-driven short squeeze of 2021. He is viewing the company as a discounted holding company. The balance sheet provides the context for this move. The company holds $8.8 billion in cash against $4.2 billion in debt.
The market cap is only $1.5 billion. Subtract the cash reserves, and an investor pays $0 for the actual retail business. CEO Ryan Cohen has signaled he wants to use that capital for acquisitions. In January, Cohen spent over $21 million of his own money to buy more shares, bringing his ownership stake to Burry is essentially buying into a multi-billion dollar cash pile led by a founder with a massive financial incentive to deploy that capital effectively.
These trades are linked by a specific macroeconomic view. Burry believes the current cycle of massive corporate spending on AI infrastructure, the AI capex cycle, is reaching a point of overextension. He expects when this spending cycle inevitably slows down, it will trigger a dislocation in the market, causing highly valued tech stocks to corrupt sharply.
In a scenario where the broader market loses value, liquid cash becomes the most powerful asset a company or an investor can hold. This explains his pivot toward businesses like PayPal and GameStop. He is acquiring assets that are either generating massive amounts of cash or are already sitting on multi-billion dollar reserves.
Burry is ignoring the excitement surrounding high-growth tech and focusing on raw balance sheet strength. He is positioning his portfolio to stay liquid and defensive, ready to buy once the broader market goes on. The S&P 500 recently pushed past 7,100 points. Capital is aggressively flooding into artificial intelligence infrastructure,
chip stocks, and momentum names. Step outside that narrow corridor of euphoria and the market looks entirely different. Payment stocks have bled out by 80%. Specialty retail is down 50%. Entire sectors like healthcare and distressed mortgages have been left for dead by institutional money. This wreckage is exactly where Michael Burry, the investor who famously shorted the 2008 housing market, is deploying his capital.
Across six massive concentrated trades in just a few weeks, he bypassed the AI boom to accumulate the exact assets the crowd is discarding. To many, catching these falling knives looks reckless. Burry, however, operates within a framework where his downside is strictly capped, even as the potential upside remains significant.
Burry is engineering entry points into these broken assets right now, using specific mathematical structures to ensure his capital remains productive, regardless of when the tech momentum finally cools. We can see the strategy applied to the accounting of Molina Healthcare. Out of 19 Wall Street analysts covering the stock, only three rated a buy.
The headline numbers look terrifying, driven by a 95% year-over-year decline in first quarter earnings per share. The 95% plunge is a calculation error by the crowd. This isolated segment represents a one-time $93 million impairment charge tied to exiting a Medicare Advantage product line. It is a non-cash accounting penalty, not an operational failure.
Strip away the paper penalty and this visual reveals the underlying business. The company generated over $1 billion in operating cash flow for the quarter, hiding an enormous cash machine beneath a temporary accounting hit. A return to a normalized 15 times multiple on projected earnings yields a $300 stock.
From Burry's entry near $174, that is a 70% return without requiring anything heroic from the company's management. The opportunity exists because the broader market reacts to top-line algorithms and lazy headlines, pricing a temporary accounting adjustment as if it were a terminal decline in the business.
Burry found a different setup in the distressed mortgage market. On April 24th, he added to his positions in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac common stock, assets that have traded like dead paper since a 2012 government sweep diverted their profits. This position rests on a binary regulatory outcome. It is a bet that shifting political will and new leadership at the Housing Finance Agency will finally end the federal conservatorship of these entities.
If we weigh the risk-to-reward ratio, the math is compelling. Burry is paying roughly 76 cents a share for an asset where absolute pessimism is already priced in. On the opposite side of the scale, a successful release from conservatorship could value those same shares at $40 or more a piece. Political tailwinds for this exit are at their strongest in years.
If the regulatory reforms currently being implemented reach their conclusion, these heavily compressed shares become multi-baggers almost instantly. By purchasing assets where near certain bearishness has already erased the downside, any positive surprise generates a payoff that is mathematically tilted in the investor's favor.
His most technically precise move targets Bruker Corporation. Instead of buying common stock, Burry purchased their 6.375% mandatory convertible preferred shares. This specific contract guarantees multiple distinct layers of return. Simply by holding the preferred stock until its 2028 conversion date, he collects a fixed yield paid out quarterly, exceeding the returns available on Treasury bills.
If Bruker's valuation climbs, his preferred shares automatically convert into common stock at a set minimum rate, allowing him to capture the market gains. The mechanics of the conversion provide a built-in safety net. If the common stock falls below a threshold price, the conversion rate recalculates.
The further the underlying stock price drops, the more total shares Burry is awarded to cushion his losses. In a single instrument, he locked in a dividend yield, uncapped equity upside, and a structural margin of safety that awards him more equity if the market turns against the company. Using the strict legal structure of a contract allows an investor to tilt the mathematical outcomes in their favor, regardless of which direction the broader market moves.
Warren Buffett famously advised investors to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. While the strategy is widely quoted, it is rarely executed. It requires the stomach to buy broken, universally discarded companies right at the moment the rest of the world is throwing capital at shiny momentum trends.
Markets rarely make immediate needle tops, and Burry is not waiting for an AI crash to justify his positions. He is buying the wreckage now because the discounts already exist in PayPal, Sprouts, and Molina. History shows that lasting empires in finance are built by accumulating quality assets when nobody wants them.
John Templeton and Howard Marks built their careers on this exact contrarian accumulation during market booms. Five years from now, most investors will remember chasing the AI peak. A small group will look back on today as the moment they used the market's blind spots to build a superior long-term position, accumulating the wealth the crowd was too dis-
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