Michael Burry's 2026 Portfolio Doesn't Exist: Steal His 3-Step Method Instead

What is really inside Michael Burry's 2026 recession portfolio?

Nothing you can see. 

Burry deregistered Scion in November 2025, so his book is now invisible.

In this episode of Making Billions, I explain why the portfolio every video claims to reveal probably does not exist, and show you Burry's actual method instead and how to run it in private markets where you operate.

This episode is brought to you by Reef Pass | Serial Acquisition Investors: Reef Pass Investors has spent the last 10 years focused on partnering with founders to launch and build long-term holding companies, and has a proven track record doing exactly that.

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Instead of copying a portfolio you cannot see, I show you how to steal the method. Burry did not forecast a recession in the big short. He read the loan documents, found the exact reset date millions of borrowers could not survive, then bought a defined downside instrument with asymmetric upside. 

Read the contract, find the date, buy the asymmetry, define the downside. That is the whole edge, and he ran the same playbook again in 2025.

The translation for private markets: you cannot short a buyout fund, but distress shows up as a date on which someone is contractually forced to transact. 

For fund managers, allocators, family offices, and institutional investors, this is the framework for reading the calendar instead of the news and making sure you are still solvent when your date arrives.

Watch to learn why being right does not pay, but being right and solvent does.

DOWNLOAD The Hidden Investing Framework Michael Burry Actually Used (That Almost Nobody Understands): https://fundraisecapital.slack.com/archives/D09PDJ5MTFV/p1786324300534479

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[THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is a fund manager, capital strategist, and former CFO turned angel investor in technology and energy. He is the founder of Fund Raise Capital and Aequor Capital Partners, and has mentored over 1,000 fund managers across private equity, private credit, venture capital, real estate, and alternative assets globally.

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Transcript

Ryan Miller

Every video you've seen titled Inside Michael Burry's 2026 Recession Portfolio is describing a portfolio that, let's be honest, probably doesn't exist. Let me explain. See, here's the fact Michael Burry deregistered Scion Asset Management with the SEC on November 10th, 2025. His last 13F was filed November 3rd. There is no Q4 filing. There is no 2026 filing. There will never be another one. Nobody can see this book. Nobody can. And when you look at what he's actually posting in public every week, under his own name, the man is not sitting in a bunker. He is buying. So today we're going to do something better than copy a portfolio that you can't see. We're gonna steal this method. And I'm gonna show you exactly how to run it in private markets where you actually operate. 

Ryan Miller

Before we dive in, just a word from our sponsor. When doing deals, we all know that raising capital is the one thing that unlocks everything. That's why I've partnered with Reef Pass Investors that are actively funding deals right now. So if you're a deal syndicator or founder thinking about launching an M&A focused buy and build platform, reach out to Reef Pass Investors at reefpassInvestors.com.  They are one of the best investors in the game that are helping you launch a new long-term holding company. So here's what I want you to do: click the description in the notes and contact them for a discovery call and potentially get an invite to pitch your next M&A deal. Now, let's get back to the show.  

Ryan Miller

 Before we dive in, just a quick disclaimer. Nothing in this episode is legal, financial, tax, or investment advice. This is just for entertainment purposes only, and you should always check with accredited professionals before making any decision from this show or otherwise. Now, that's that. Let's dive in. 

Ryan Miller

So let me lay out the receipt because this matters and almost nobody has done it. Fact number one. On November 10th, 2025, Scion Asset Management's registration as an investment advisor was terminated. Burry left the hedge fund business. He's not managing outside money anymore. In his words, he's still running his own money and still active in markets, but the fund is done. Fact number two, the last 13F Scion ever filed was on November 3rd, 2025, covering the third quarter. There is no Q4 2025 filing. The deadline came and went in February and nothing appeared, because the obligation went away with the fund. Now, sit with that and what that means. The 13F is the only window the public ever had into his portfolio. It's gone permanently. So when a creator makes a video called Inside Michael Burry's 2026 recession portfolio, they're doing one of two things. Either they're recycling a stale filing from Q3 of last year, calling it 2026, or they're just making it up. Fact number three. And this is the one that should embarrass the entire financial inter-myth. Sorry, not sorry. Remember the headlines? Burry bets $1.1 billion against AI, $912 million against Palantir, $187 million against NVIDIA. It was everywhere. Those numbers came off of that old 13F. And here's what the 13F actually requires you to report for an options position. The notional value of the underlying shares, not the money you spent, not the capital you put at risk, the notional. 

Ryan Miller

So Burry came out and clarified it publicly. The premium he actually paid on the Palantir position was about $9.2 million. 9.2 million, not $912 million. That's roughly 1% of that number that ran in every headline on Earth. Can you see how this is bizarre? The financial media was off by a factor of about 100. And an entire generation of retail investors formed a view of the market based on a number that was wrong by two orders of magnitude. And Burry addressed this himself in writing on his own platform. He wrote that news media has, and I'm quoting him, wildly misrepresented many of my mandatory SEC filings, and that it caused havoc in markets and angry debates that he never intended. Then there's fact four. He now publishes publicly. He started a Substack called Cassandra Unchained in November of 2025. And he posts what he calls trading posts most weeks, where he describes what he's actually doing.

Ryan Miller

 So what has he been doing in 2026? Go look at the public record. June 8th, buying a long-term compounder on a simple rule. June 12th. And I'm quoting the post, quote, the market continues to punish the stocks of large, well-established businesses with significant owners, earnings, little debt, and large buybacks, end quote. And then there's June 18th, dollar cost averaging volume signals. June 25th, Hong Kong adds one new position. And listen to this. One short cover. June 13th, Window Dressing, Semiconductors, and Caterpillar. Does that sound like a man in a doomsday recession portfolio to you? So this is why I call BS on it. 

Ryan Miller

Now, let me be disciplined here because I am about to be the only person in this conversation who is. I do not know what Michael Burry owns today. Neither does anybody else. What I can tell you is what he has published under his own name. And what he has published describes a man buying established businesses and covering shorts, not one hiding in cash. And that fits the method he has run for 25 years. Mostly long, raising cash by simply not deploying when things get a little rich, and buying puts on the fulcrum points of a mania as a hedge sized in premium, he can afford to lose entirely. That's not a recession portfolio. That's a value book with a cheap tail hedge stapled to it. And nobody is selling that to you, that video, because it doesn't get the clicks. So the entire genre of content built on this signal is fiction, which is great news for you because the truth is more useful than fiction, and almost nobody is telling it except for right now. 

Ryan Miller

Now, let's go back and get the original story right because the movie got you the drama and skipped the mechanism. Everybody thinks the big short was a macro call, that Burry looked at housing, decided it was a bubble, and then shorted it. Well, maybe, but that's not exactly what happened. What happened is that Michael Burry sat down and read the loan documents, thousands of pages of mortgage prospectuses that by his own account nobody else on Wall Street was reading. Not the people who packaged them, not the people who rated them, not the people who bought them. And inside these documents was a contract, specifically a structure called a 2/28 ARM, a teaser rate for two years. Then it resets to a floating rate for the remaining 28. Burry didn't have to forecast a recession, he didn't have to predict unemployment or GDP or when the Fed would move. He just had to read the reset date. He knew, not believed, knew that beginning in a specific window in 2007, millions of borrowers who could barely afford the teaser payment would face a payment they mathematically could not make. Not might not, but could not. The contract said so. It's all there in writing. That's the entire edge. Right there. He didn't have an opinion about the future. He had a date. A contractually dated non-discretionary cash flow event that was going to happen, whether the market agreed with him or not. 

Ryan Miller

And then he did the second thing, which is the part everybody skips. He went looking for an instrument that would pay him for being right, with a downside he could define to the penny. That instrument was credit default swaps on some prime mortgage backed securities. He paid a premium. A known budgeted survivable premium. And in exchange, he got an asymmetric payoff. Read the contract, find the date, buy the asymmetry, define the downside. That is the method. Everything else, the drumming, Christian Bale, the I is set dressing. And notice, he ran that exact same playbook again in 2025. He didn't short NVIDIA with borrowed shares and unlimited downside. He bought puts. He spent $9.2 million of premium, a defined survivable number. Same discipline, 20 years apart. The man never bets the farm. He rents a lottery ticket on someone else's contract. 

Ryan Miller

Now here's the chapter nobody wants to talk about, and it's the most important one for you as a fund manager. Burry was right. And being right nearly destroyed the guy. He put the trade on and it went against him for a long time. He was paying premium every single month on those swaps, bleeding while the housing kept going up and his markets kept getting worse. His investors revolted. They demanded their money back. They accused him of style drift. Some of them even sued. He had to fight to stop them from pulling capital out of a trade that would eventually go on to make enormous returns. He had the right thesis. He had the right instrument. And he had the right date. And he almost lost the fund, anyways, because his capital structure wasn't built to survive until the date arrived. Let me say that again. He was right about the market and nearly wrong about his own fund. And that's the lesson that changes everything for a GP. 

Ryan Miller

Because here's the brutal truth about our business being early is indistinguishable from being wrong when you have a fund clock. Your investors don't grade you on your thesis, they grade you on your marks. And if your investment period expires or your fund life runs out, or your investors gate you or your fee runway dies before your date arrives, then you are wrong, not intellectually, economically, which is the only kind that pays. So hold two things in your head at the same time. One, find the date. And two, make sure your capital can live until that date. 

Ryan Miller

Now let's turn that into something you can actually run on Monday. So here's my thesis. And this is where I part ways with the herd. You cannot short private markets. There is no CDS on a mid-market buyout fund. There's no put on a vintage. There's no ticker to bet against. So every hour a GP spends watching recession content is an hour spent studying a trade they're already structurally incapable of putting on. But that does not mean you can't run Burry's method. It means the method expresses a little differently. See, in public markets, distress shows up as a price that you can short. In private markets, distress shows up as a date on which somebody is contractually compelled to make a transaction. That's the whole translation. And that's the entire episode. Because in private markets, there's no force-selling mechanism for price alone. Nobody gets a margin call because a mark moved. What forces the transaction is the contract, a fund reaching the end of its life, a credit agreement hitting maturity, a covenant test, a NAV facility coming due, an investor who needs liquidity and has run out of all other options. Those, my friends, are dated. Those are non-discretionary. And they are all written down right now in documents you can read. Exactly like Burry's mortgage perspectives. So your big short isn't a short at all. It's a calendar. I call it The Forced Seller Calendar. And building it is the most valuable thing you can do this quarter, in my humble opinion. 

Ryan Miller

So three mechanisms. Let's build it right now. Okay, so stop forecasting the recession. You will not out forecast the market, and neither will I. Instead, go find the dated contractual non-discretionary events that are already written down. And here's where they live in 2026. Fund life expiries. Every closed end fund has a term, typically 10 years, plus one or two extensions if they want to use it. It's just at the general partner's discretion, sometimes with an LPAC consent. When those extensions run out, the fund must wind down. That is a date. And it means somebody is going to have to sell assets into whatever market exists on that date. Go pull the vintage years. The 2015 through 2018 funds are running out of runway right now. Credit agreement maturities, fixed dates written in the doc, non-negotiable without a lender's consent. And a lender's consent has a price. Covenant tests and pick toggles, dated quarterly, mechanical. NAV facility maturities and LTV tests. This one is newer and a little misunderstood. And there's a real supply of it hiding off balance sheet. And subscription line limits. Dated, capped, and increasingly scrutinized. Every one of those is a contract with a clock on it. Every one of them creates a person who has to do a deal on a specific date, whether they like the price or not. That's who you want on the other side of your table. 

Ryan Miller

Now, the sharpest, most non-consensus thing I'm going to say all episode, and I want you to listen carefully. The 2026 and 27 leveraged loan maturity wall has largely been refinanced away as of early December of 2025. Maturities across 2026 and 27 had come down about $59 billion, down from about $195 billion at the end of 2024. And the herd that read that said, crisis averted. Great news. The wall is gone. The wall's not gone, my friends. The wall just moved. Because in the same data, 2028 maturities expand to about $301 billion. $300 billion. Nothing was solved. The problem got pushed down the calendar by two or three years at a higher coupon. And that's into a year that nobody's even looking at. So here's the practical consequence. And it is brutal, my friends. If you're raising a distressed or opportunistic fund right now to buy corporate distress in 2026, you're early. And you know what early costs. Early costs you your fund, potentially. The dated supply isn't landing in 26, it's landing in 28, which means the real question for a GP is not, is a recession coming? The real question is, does my fund structure survive until my date? That is the question you have to ask as a general partner. And that is a completely different question. And it has a completely different answer.

Ryan Miller

Hey, if you're finding value out of this discussion, could you do me a huge favor? Could you just take a second and hit that like or subscribe button? It costs you nothing, but it tells the algorithm that this is valuable information and it helps us to get it to more people. Thank you. You're incredible. Now let's get back to the show.

Ryan Miller

Now, corporate credit isn't the only place with a calendar. And there is one forced seller in this market who is already at the table right now in size, and the recession content completely ignores it. It's the investors, the LPs. Let's look at the data because this is where the actual distress lives with 2026. Private equity has now come off a four-year stretch of record low distributions as a percentage of NAV. Four straight years. That means for four years, investors have been sending capital in and getting very little out. The industry is sitting on roughly 33,000 unsold portfolio companies right now. The number of portfolio companies held longer than five years is up 18% versus 2024. You see how the date matters? The average age of a holding went from 3.7 years at the end of 2024 to 4.0 years by the end of 25. And the implied holding period for PE assets is now running around seven years, well beyond the historical known. 

Ryan Miller

Do you understand what that describes? That is a giant industry-wide traffic jam. The exit door narrowed, the assets kept aging, and the cash stops coming back. And an investor who isn't getting distributions still has capital calls to fund, still has target allocations, still has a board asking why the private book is over its policy weight. That investor group eventually becomes a person who must transact. So where do they go? They go to secondaries. Look at what happened. Global secondary transaction volume hit $103 billion in the first half of 25 alone. Up 51%, $68 billion in the first half of 2024. A six-month record running at a full year pace north of $210 billion. And what do they sell at? Average investor portfolio pricing came in around 90% of NAV in the first half of 25. Transaction weighted average discounts of about 13.3%. Read that again. Sophisticated institutions, pensions, endowments, insurers are selling high quality private assets at roughly a 13% discount to carry value. Not because the assets are bad, because they need cash. And the calendar says right now, that is a forced seller. That is Burry's subprime borrower wearing a better suit. 

Ryan Miller

And on the GP side of the ledger, the same pressure shows up as continuation vehicles. The average continuation vehicle in 25 was about $900 million. And the number of GP led deals over a billion dollars went from 21 in 2024 to 29 in 2025. Nearly 8% of the top 100 sponsors by AUM have now done one. Continuation vehicles are what a GP does when the fund clock runs out, but the asset isn't ready. It is quite literally a fund manager buying time from the calendar. And here's the tell on how well known this is. Dedicated secondary capital hit record numbers. $327 billion in 2025. Let me be honest with you, because I'd rather be right than to be loud. The LP led secondary trade is not a secret, but it is crowded. $327 billion of dry powder is not a market inefficiency. If your entire pitch to investors is we'll buy LP stakes at a discount, you're now the 11th person to say this this month. And you will get repriced. The edge is not in the trade. The edge is in specificity. It is in the corners of the calendar where the dedicated capital just isn't looking. It's small stakes, the odd structures, the single asset situations, the sectors those megaphones can't underwrite, the geographies they can't service, and the 2028 corporate maturities nobody is staging capital for yet. That's Burry's actual lesson. Well, it is to me. He didn't short housing. Everybody could see housing. He found the one instrument on the one tranche with the one reset date that nobody bothered to read. And specificity is the alpha. It always was. 

Ryan Miller

Now the third mechanism, the instrument. Burry never took unlimited downside ever. He bought CDS, pay a premium, capital loss. He bought puts, pay a premium, cap the loss. $9.2 million of premium against a position the media thought was $912 million. That is not timidity. That is the entire reason you survive long enough to be right. So when you build your side of The Forced Seller Trade, structure for the same shape. Known survivable downside, asymmetric upside, and critically a payoff that doesn't require you to be right about the macro, only about the contract. See in private markets, the instrument that carry that shape include structured or preferred equity, where you sit senior to comment with a coupon and a liquidation preference, and you participate in the upside. Rescue financing with real covenants and real collateral. NAV lending against diversified seasoned pools with conservative advance rates. Single asset continuation vehicles where you underwrite one company you actually know. Discounted investor LP stakes where you're buying seasoned identifiable assets, not a blind pool, and senior secured positions in the 2028 maturity stack staged. So you arrive when the paper does. And notice what all of those have in common. In every one, you're being paid to provide liquidity to somebody the calendar has cornered. And in every one, you can write down your maximum loss before you even sign. And on sizing, take the discipline from the man himself. Your capital at risk on any single dated bet should be an amount that, if it goes to zero, does not impair the fund. Burry was willing to lose 100% of 9.2 million. He was not willing to lose the firm. So if a single position in your fund can take you out, you don't have a thesis. You have a hostage situation. 

Ryan Miller

So let's put the whole thing together into how a GP actually positions. Educational, not advice. Take all of this from your own council and your own investment committee. Instruments and structures. The liquidity provider stack I just walked you through, preferred and structured equity, rescue capital, NAV lending, single asset CVs, target secondaries, and senior secured exposure staged against that wall in 2028. Then there's timing. This is where most managers absolutely get clobbered. So let's be precise. Your deployment window has to overlap your outdated events. The corporate distress calendar says 2028. The LP liquidity calendar says right now, but it's crowded. So the structural answer for most managers is a barbell. Take the crowded but live opportunity today with modest size and modest expectations and build the vehicle and the relationships now. So you're staged for 2028 supply whenever it lands. Then there's sizing. Cap the loss on any single dated position at a level the fund can absorb, full stop. And then model the failure case first. Write down what happens if the date slips by 18 months because dates, they slip. That refinancing wave that pushed 2026 into 2028, that is a date slipping in real time right in front of us. And there's structure. And this is the big one. The one Burry paid for in blood. Match your capital's duration to your calendar. Let me say that again. Match your capital's duration to your calendar. See, if your thesis pays in 2028 and your investment period closes in 2027, you'll be forced to deploy into the wrong year and you will lose. While being completely correct. If your thesis pays in 2028, you need a vehicle whose life extension, options, recycling provisions, and fee runway all reach past 2028 with room to spare. Now that could mean a longer dated fund. It could mean an evergreen structure. It could mean a deal-by-deal or pledge structure where you don't start the clock until the opportunity is actually real. It could mean negotiating extension rights up front instead of begging for them later. That is real structuring in decision. And you make it when you write the LPA, not when the opportunity arrives. And the LP conversation this unlocks is the most differentiated pitch you can make in this market. Well, every other manager is walking in with a macro forecast. You walk in with a calendar. Here are the dated contractual events. Here is who is forced to transact and win. Here is the instrument we use. Here is our maximum loss. Here is why our fund structure survives until the date. That is not a forecast. That is an underwriting. And allocators can tell the difference in about 90 seconds. And remember the Formula: Trust times the transaction equals capital coming to you. Trust is showing them a calendar instead of an opinion. And transaction is a structure that can still be standing whenever that date arrives. 

Ryan Miller

Now, where could I be wrong? Well, three places, and I want them on the record. One, the 2028 wall gets refinanced too. It just happened for 2026 and 2027. $195 billion became $59 billion. If credit markets stay wide open and spreads stay tight, sponsors will keep kicking that can down the road and the distress never fully lands. In that world, the patient capital I'm telling you to build costs you management fees on money you never get to deploy well. That's a real cost, and I won't pretend otherwise. Two, the secondary's discount closes. $327 billion of dedicated dry powder is a lot of buyers. Pricing already firmed into about 90% of NAV. If it goes to par, the LP liquidity trade is simply gone as a source of return. And everybody who raised a fund on it has now got a massive problem. Then there's number three, exits reopen and the traffic dam actually clears. The IPO and M&A windows open properly. Distributions normalize, the LP stops it being a force seller, and 33,000 companies start moving again. The whole forced seller thesis starts to deflate. Watch those three. If you see them move, you update. That's the drill. Seven days. None of this requires a market call. 

Ryan Miller

Day one, pull your own documents, your LPA, your fund term, your extension options, your recycling provisions. Write down the exact month your investment period ends. And the exact month your fund life ends. See, most GPs can't tell you this from memory. Be the one who can. Day two, build the calendar. Six to ten dated contractual events you can actually name. Fund expires in your sector. Credit maturities in your portfolio and your competitors' covenant tests. NAV facility dates. Put a date and a dollar side on each one. Then day three, compute the duration gap. For each event, subtract the months until your fund can no longer act from the months until the event fires. If that number is negative, you will be forced to sit out your own thesis. That's the Burry trap, and you just found it in an afternoon. Then day four, pick the instrument. For your single highest conviction dated event, write one page. What do I buy? Where do I sit in the stack? And what is my maximum loss in dollars and what has to be true for the payoff? Then day five, stress test the date. Slide every event 18 months later. Does your structure still work? If not, the structure is the problem, not the thesis. Then day six, fix the structure. Talk to fund council about the specific changes, extension rights, recycling, a longer dated or even an evergreen vehicle, or a deal-by-deal sleeve. That lets your capital outlive your calendar. Then day seven, take the calendar to an LP. Not a forecast, a calendar. And watch what happens to that conversation. 

Ryan Miller

So I built you the tool for this. It's called The Forced Seller Calendar, and it's fully interactive. You open it, you put your numbers in, and it calculates. Or if you're using the PDF, you can print it off and do that too. Module A is the calendar itself. You enter your entire dated contractual events. The fund expires, the maturity, the covenant test, with a date in size and a pressure rating. And it computes months to trigger, and it shows you where the dated supply actually clusters. Then module B is the asymmetry sizer, capital at risk, maximum loss, target multiple, your estimated probability. It gives you your break-even hit rate, your expected value, and your loss as a percentage of the fund. So you never take a position that you can't take out. Then there's module C is the patient capital test. And it's the one that matters the most. It computes your duration gap, the months your capital can still act, minus the months until your event fires. Negative means you will be right and still lose. It's the number Burry paid for the hard way. All three roll together into a 100.4 seller readiness score. It's free. It saves you work. The link, it's in the notes. 

Ryan Miller

And if you're a fund manager who wants to build the structures, the terms, and the LP relationships to actually execute this, that's what we do inside my community of fundraisers and fund managers. It's Fund Raise Capital Community. It's a global membership community for fund managers. You get education on how to identify, research, and approach institutional capital sources. You get the capital raising frameworks and the playbooks, and you get to build your network with other asset managers from around the world. You get a global community of fund managers raising at the highest levels, and you get weekly live education sessions with me. So if that's you, apply. The link is also in the notes. 

Ryan Miller

So let me leave you with this. The market is going to spend the next year screaming about a recession that may or may not come. And in that noise, thousands of fund managers are going to sit and refresh their feats, waiting for a crash they cannot short in a market that has no ticker. Don't be that guy. Michael Burry's edge was never that he saw the future. His edge was that he read the contract while everybody else just watched the news. The date was already written. He just bothered to look. So go read your documents. Build the calendar. Find the person the clock has cornered. Buy the asymmetry, define your downside, and above all, make sure your capital is still standing when your date finally arrives. Because being right doesn't pay, being right and solvent does. You do these things, and you too will be well in your way in your pursuit  of Making Billions.