Michael Burry Doubles Down on Nasdaq 100 Puts, Calls October High a 'Bull Trap'

Burry has evolved from shorting individual AI stocks to betting against the entire Nasdaq 100 with 2027-expiry puts ~20% out of the money. Jensen Huang's departure from Nvidia is accelerating his conviction.

Michael Burry, the investor who famously shorted the housing market before the 2008 crash, has doubled his put position on the Nasdaq 100, targeting early 2027 expiry contracts roughly 20% out of the money. He made the move on November 12, buying into a bounce from the 27,000 level, and described the Nasdaq 100's October 6 high as a "bull trap" comparable to the March 2000 dot-com peak.

Burry's short thesis has evolved throughout 2026. He began by shorting individual stocks — Nvidia and Palantir among them — then shifted to broader instruments like the VanEck Semiconductor ETF. Now the Nasdaq 100 itself is the primary target. The logic is top-down: if chip valuations collapse, the index-level damage is unavoidable given semiconductor weighting. The catalyst that intensified his conviction was Jensen Huang's departure as Nvidia CEO. Burry warned investors to "get out" of Nvidia positions, arguing the leadership vacuum threatens both margins and growth trajectory. He views the Huang exit not as an isolated corporate event but as a structural inflection point for the entire AI supply chain. Burry explicitly named the downstream casualties: CoreWeave and Nebius, both major Nvidia GPU buyers, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which fabricates Nvidia's advanced chips. His argument is that Nvidia's market power functioned as a subsidy to the entire AI ecosystem, and that power is now entering "a new paradigm" — his words — of diminished influence. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF remains a key vehicle for Burry's thesis. Nvidia and TSMC are its two largest holdings, making it a concentrated bet on exactly the outcome he predicts. He repurchased put positions on this ETF after previously selling them, signaling renewed conviction rather than new analysis. Burry's framing matters as much as his positioning. By drawing explicit parallels to the dot-com bubble, he is arguing this is not a correction within a bull market but the terminal phase of a speculative cycle. The "bull trap" label implies the October high will not be revisited — a falsifiable claim that markets will test in the coming months. Whether Burry is right depends on whether AI capital expenditure actually contracts or merely decelerates. His 2027 timeline gives the thesis roughly six to eight months to play out. The puts are 20% out of the money, meaning the Nasdaq 100 would need to fall substantially from current levels for the trade to pay off. This is not a hedge — it is a directional bet with a defined expiration.