Michael Burry: What Scion's SEC Filings Show, 2016 to 2025
Michael Burry is the investor who signs the SEC filings of Scion Asset Management, LLC as its chief executive. Its 32 quarterly 13F holdings reports on EDGAR run from the quarter ended 31 Dec 2015 to the one ended 30 Sep 2025, and its SEC registration as an adviser ended on 10 Nov 2025.
Much of what is repeated about Michael Burry comes from a book and a film. This page uses neither for its facts. It reads the filings his firm made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which anyone can open on EDGAR, and reports what they contain, what they leave out, and when they stopped.
How it works
Scion Asset Management, LLC is the firm; Michael J. Burry signs for it. Its 13F report for the quarter ended 30 Sep 2025 is signed by “Michael J. Burry, Chief Executive Officer” and dated 3 Nov 2025. Its April 2020 Schedule 13D names him as a reporting person alongside Scion Asset Management, Scion Asset Partners and Scion Capital Group, and says the firm manages two funds and a separately managed account. The funds are private limited partnerships, not public funds, which is what a hedge fund manager usually means.
The name most people know comes from an earlier chapter. Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short, published by W. W. Norton, profiles investors who profited from shorting subprime mortgages, and the publisher’s page names Burry among them. That story predates the EDGAR record used here, so this page repeats none of the book’s figures.
The two public records: Form 13F and Schedule 13D
Form 13F is the window. A manager with $100 million or more in listed US securities files one within 45 days of each quarter’s end, listing its long positions in those securities plus the stocks underlying any listed puts and calls. The institutional trading page covers the rule itself. For Scion the gap between quarter end and filing had a median of 45 days and never exceeded 47.
A Schedule 13D is the other window. It is filed when a holder passes 5% of a company’s voting shares with more than a passive interest. Scion filed two such series: Tailored Brands from 30 Aug 2019 and GameStop from 10 Apr 2020.
What the filings contain
Thirty-two quarterly reports. EDGAR lists 42 filings under Scion’s number: 32 original 13F-HR reports, one 13F-HR amendment, two Schedule 13Ds, five 13D amendments and two N-PX proxy-vote reports. The first 13F covers the quarter ended 31 Dec 2015 and was filed on 16 Feb 2016.
A gap of two years. After the report for 30 Sep 2016, filed 14 Nov 2016, no 13F exists for the eight quarters from 31 Dec 2016 to 30 Sep 2018. Filing resumes on 14 Feb 2019. The record does not say why, and a lapse like that can simply mean the portfolio sat below the $100 million filing line.
Short lists. The number of entries per report ran from 1, on 30 Jun 2022 when the only line was GEO Group, to 33, on both 30 Sep 2020 and 30 Jun 2023. The median was 12.5. That is a concentrated book by 13F standards, so a single line can dominate the total.
Puts and calls in 13 of 32 reports. Options are where the headline numbers come from, and the worked example shows why.
A worked example
Take the 30 Sep 2025 report, filed 3 Nov 2025. It lists 8 entries with a reported value of $1,381,198,076. The largest entry is a put on Palantir Technologies: 5,000,000 shares, value $912,100,000.
- $912,100,000 divided by 5,000,000 shares is $182.42 a share.
- Palantir closed at $182.42 on 30 Sep 2025, per Yahoo Finance’s daily data.
- So the “value” is simply the underlying shares times the quarter-end price. It says nothing about what the put options cost, their strike or their expiry, none of which Form 13F asks for.
- The same holds for the second-largest line, an Nvidia put: 1,000,000 shares at Nvidia’s 30 Sep 2025 close of $186.58 gives the $186,580,000 reported.
The headline therefore mixes two different things. Of the $1.38 billion, puts account for $1,098,680,000, calls for $214,380,000 and shares for $68,138,076. Options were 95.1% of the reported value, and the stock the firm actually owned outright was about 4.9% of it.
The original data
The data: every 13F-HR information table Scion filed, parsed line by line from EDGAR on 25 Sep 2026, with values before 2023 multiplied by 1,000 because the form reported them in thousands until 3 Jan 2023. Each report’s total was checked against the filing’s own summary page. The result is published as a CSV of all 32 quarters.
The four tallest bars are almost all options. 30 Jun 2021 reported $2,081,933,000 with options at 93.4%, the largest single line a Tesla put. 30 Jun 2023 reported $1,736,760,059 with options at 93.6%, mostly puts on the SPDR S&P 500 and Invesco QQQ funds. 30 Sep 2025 reported $1,381,198,076 at 95.1% options, and 31 Mar 2021 reported $1,353,930,000 at 91.4%. In the other quarters the reported value was far smaller, and in 19 of 32 reports no option appears at all. A chart of 13F value over time is mostly a chart of option exposure, which is why the split matters more than the total.
The record then stops. No filing of any kind appears under Scion’s EDGAR number after 3 Nov 2025, as read on 25 Sep 2026, although reports for 31 Dec 2025, 31 Mar 2026 and 30 Jun 2026 would have been due by then had the firm still been filing. The SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database lists the firm’s SEC registration status as “Terminated”, effective 10 Nov 2025, seven days after the last 13F. The dated record is in a CSV of the filing milestones.
What the 13Ds add. Scion reported 5.1% of Tailored Brands on 30 Aug 2019 and raised it through 6.4%, 7.2% and 8.3% before cutting to 3.5% on 7 May 2020. It reported 5.3% of GameStop, 3,400,000 shares, on 10 Apr 2020, and 4.3% on 6 May 2020.
When it fails
Copying a 13F fails on timing. The report arrives about 45 days after the quarter ends and shows only where the book stood on that single day. Anything bought and sold between two quarter ends never appears, and by the filing date the position may already be gone.
Reading options value as money at risk fails. The worked example shows the Palantir put as $912.1 million only because 5,000,000 shares times $182.42 comes to that. What the puts cost is not on the form. Headlines that call such a line a bet of that size are reading the column wrong.
Reading a put as a directional prediction fails too. A put can be a hedge against other holdings, part of a spread, or a position that is closed days later. The form does not say which.
The form is incomplete by design. It leaves out short selling of stock, cash, bonds and anything outside the SEC’s list of reportable securities. A 13F can look bearish or bullish while the rest of the book says the opposite.
And a stopped record is not a statement. The absence of filings after November 2025 tells a reader that the firm no longer reports to the SEC. It does not reveal what, if anything, it holds now, and no figure on this page describes performance, because none of these filings report one.
Related
The institutional trading page explains Form 13F alongside the other public records of large-fund activity and why every one of them is late. Put options covers the instrument behind most of Scion’s largest reported values. The hedge fund page sets out who may invest in funds like Scion’s and how they are paid. And value investing explains the price-against-worth approach to picking stocks, the other half of reading any list of holdings.
Read a famous fund’s 13F as a dated list of what it was allowed to show, not as a trade to copy. I check the put and call column and the filing date first, because the headline number is often options exposure that is already six weeks old.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.