Michael Burry's China Exit and the Return to MercadoLibre: Inside Scion's Q1 2026 13F

Michael Burry has never run a large book by dollar terms, but few investors move markets on filing day the way he does. Scion Asset Management's Q1 2026 13F, filed May 15 for the quarter ended March 31, shows a portfolio that got smaller, more concentrated, and more pointed — both in what Burry bought and what he walked away from entirely.

The China basket is gone

The headline change is a full exit from Chinese technology. Alibaba, JD.com, and Baidu — the core of Scion's China trade — were liquidated completely in a single quarter. Burry has rotated in and out of Chinese internet stocks before, but clearing the entire grouping at once reads less like profit-taking on individual names and more like a macro call: regulatory risk, delisting overhang, or simply a loss of conviction in the trade as a group. When a manager known for concentrated, high-conviction positions removes an entire country bucket in one filing, it's worth treating as a signal rather than noise.

With the China basket gone and the portfolio trimmed to just nine total names, Scion is about as concentrated as it's been in years. That makes every remaining position — and every new one — carry outsized weight in reading Burry's current thinking. You can track how concentrated a portfolio is relative to its peers using InvestorLens's investor profiles.

Back into MercadoLibre, and into beaten-down SaaS

In place of China, Burry initiated a new position in MercadoLibre (MELI) — a name he owned and then exited in 2025. He confirmed the buy publicly on his Substack on May 9, ahead of the 13F deadline, which is unusual for a manager who typically lets the filing itself do the talking. The re-entry suggests Burry sees Latin America's largest e-commerce and fintech platform as a cleaner way to get emerging-market growth exposure than China currently offers, without the geopolitical and disclosure risk attached to Chinese ADRs.

The other new additions point the same direction: enterprise software that has been beaten down through 2026's valuation reset. Scion added Adobe (ADBE), Autodesk (ADSK), and Veeva Systems (VEEV) — three SaaS franchises with durable competitive positions that have de-rated sharply as investors rotated out of software and into AI infrastructure names. Lululemon (LULU) also remains a core holding, continuing a high-conviction bet on a retailer that's traded well below its historical multiple. PayPal (PYPL) rounds out the additions, another cash-generative platform business trading at a fraction of its 2021 peak valuation.

The common thread across MercadoLibre, Adobe, Autodesk, Veeva, and PayPal is straightforward value investing: profitable, capital-generative businesses that the market has priced as if their growth is over. It's a classic Burry setup — buying quality where sentiment has overshot to the downside — just applied to software and platform businesses instead of the mortgage market or biotech that made his name.

Still short the AI trade

Burry's bearish positioning against the AI rally hasn't gone anywhere. Scion continues to hold sizable put options against Nvidia (NVDA) and Palantir (PLTR), the two stocks that have become shorthand for AI-infrastructure euphoria over the past two years. Combined with the software buys, the portfolio now reads as a coherent thesis: the market is overpaying for AI infrastructure exposure and underpaying for the software incumbents actually monetizing AI at the application layer.

It's worth remembering that 13F filings only capture long equity and options positions as of quarter-end, disclosed with a 45-day lag — Scion's puts could easily have been resized or closed since March 31. Burry has also been known to take out or reduce hedges shortly after each filing becomes public, so treat the NVDA and PLTR shorts as a snapshot of Q1 thinking rather than a live position.

Reading the signal

A nine-name portfolio that just dropped an entire country and rotated fully into unloved software, e-commerce, and retail names is a much cleaner statement than most 13Fs offer. Whether or not Burry's specific picks work out, the shape of the portfolio — concentrated, contrarian, explicitly short the market's current darlings — is a useful data point for anyone trying to gauge how skeptical positioning looks right now among the investors with the best track record of being early. For a broader read on how hedge fund positioning is shifting across the board this quarter, InvestorLens's flow tracker and macro consensus pages aggregate changes across all tracked 13F filers, and the overlap tool can show whether any other major funds followed Burry back into MercadoLibre or the SaaS names he's now betting on.

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Data sourced from public SEC 13F filings. Educational research only — not investment advice.