Thin Tape, Crowded Tech 13Fs; Burry Goes All-In Short
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Volume ice age, then the consumer prints
August 14 (U.S. Eastern) was dead quiet. SPX volume looked like the lightest session in about three months, so there is little fresh price story to update. Into the weekend, the more useful inputs are two consumer releases, Q2 13F snapshots, and Michael Burry’s personal book update through August 13.
July retail sales fell 0.6% m/m, well below the +0.1% expected. Ex-autos -0.3% (vs +0.2%); ex-autos and gasoline -0.2%. The control group most tied to GDP consumption fell 0.4% (vs +0.3%). July spending momentum clearly cooled.
August University of Michigan sentiment dropped to 51, below 54.5 expected and 55.2 prior, breaking a two-month rebound. Current conditions 51.8 and expectations 50.6 also missed hard. Only about 8% of respondents expect income growth to beat inflation over the next year. One-year inflation expectations edged up from 4.2% to 4.3%; five-year stayed at 3.3%.
Treat 13Fs as trend, not a live order ticket
Q2 13Fs are filed within 45 days of quarter-end. Positions can already have changed in that window. Use them for direction and concentration, not as tomorrow’s trade list.
BRK added GOOG, Delta, homebuilders LEN/DHI, M, and NYT; cut BAC, COF, and ALLY; exited STZ. The top five roughly run AAPL, AXP, KO, GOOG, BAC. Versus prior years, Google’s multi-quarter build has pushed it into the top five while bank exposure slides back.
Renaissance leaned into hard tech: adds in NVDA, META, AVGO, CRWD, AMZN, MDT; cuts in memory MU and SNDK; exits in APP and SMH. Less semiconductor ETF, more single-name leaders — a more concentrated, more aggressive semi bet. Top five roughly NVDA, META, INTC, UTHR, PLTR.
Baillie Gifford added NVDA, GOOG, AXON, SPCX; trimmed AMZN, MELI, SHOP, NFLX, NET, RKLB. Top five roughly SPCX, NVDA, AMZN, MELI, SE.
Bridgewater added SHEL and PG; cut AMZN. Treat SPY/IVV as one S&P sleeve, then NVDA, AVGO, AMZN, GOOG.
Pershing Square added NFLX, Visa, Mastercard, SPGI, ICE, ALC, MSFT, META; cut AMZN; exited GOOG and HTZ. Top five roughly UBER, BN, MSFT, AMZN, plus another holding-company/real-estate style name.
Several books cut AMZN. That is often rebalancing after a run, not a collective abandonment. Across top holdings, the common thread is still semis and megacap tech — not fame, but the strongest growth and hottest capital in this cycle. Dispersion comes later, once the cycle stabilizes and new themes appear.
Burry: truly short, and swapping the weapon
Personal update through August 13 (fund closed; no 13F). Outside estimates put assets around $200–350M; nobody has a hard number. The stance matters more than the size.
Longs are thin. A first sleeve around the high-single-digit percent of the book includes names like ADBE, MELI, ZTS, and JD; a second sleeve includes Lululemon, PayPal, Veeva, Flutter, Molina, HCA and peers — some soft tape names among them; lower down sit FNMA, FMCC, SFM-type exposures. Limited longs fit the “big short” label.
The short side is the point: previously Philadelphia semis, MU, Nebius, NVDA, ORCL, PLTR, Caterpillar, and QQQ puts. Fresh moves: cover Tesla and AMAT shorts for a profit; close all SOXX puts and roll into larger QQQ puts out to June 2027 — swapping a semi-ETF short for a broader Nasdaq tool and still adding. Also add MU short and lift cash to about 12%. Option shorts are leveraged shorts; higher cash is de-levering and keeping margin so a grind higher does not force a cascade.
Longs still have the edge — do not confuse quiet volume with a breakout
The tape is chopping near highs. After the Nasdaq breakout, even a slow melt-up keeps pressure on shorts. Semiconductors remain capped. If SPX keeps pressing and clears a short-stop zone near roughly 7900, covering could accelerate. A fresh Nasdaq high leaves shorts with almost no reason to stay.
Light volume now looks like both sides waiting for size. Real upside on rising volume is when short covering is more likely to push. For longs, the setup is still relatively favorable — roughly a 60–70% edge versus 30–40% for shorts as a rough probability split. Burry’s hard short is uncomfortable here; that does not mean longs can ignore concentration risk — only that the odds have not flipped to the short side yet.