Michael Burry's book, re-examined — the mechanism, not the man.
Burry is a member of the Blaque Baux family. The core repo is the engine and blueprint — a governed, systematic platform (Julia) with a venue-agnostic execution controller and a Layer-3 live-money safety gate. Burry points that engine in its own direction and inherits the governance wholesale.
Not investment advice. Educational/research software. Nothing here is validated. See LICENSE.
git clone --recursive https://github.com/blaquebaux/burry.git
julia --project=engine -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.instantiate()' # one-time engine setupMichael Burry is famous for concentrated, contrarian, deeply-researched bets — subprime in 2007, and a rotating book of hated deep-value names and macro shorts since. The temptation is to copy the man: read the 13F, buy what he bought. That is a losing game — 13Fs are 45 days stale, show only long US equity (not shorts, options, or sizing), and the edge was never the ticker; it was the process.
Burry asks a different question: is the mechanism underneath his book systematizable? Strip the personality and what remains is a recognizable style — low price-to-book, high free-cash-flow yield, out-of-favor and heavily-shorted names, hard assets over narrative. We treat the disclosed book as a label, decompose it into factor exposures, and test whether that exposure still carries a premium net of cost — and whether the contrarian short leg is a real edge or a widow-maker.
- Decompose the book. Map the disclosed 13F positions onto factor exposures (value, quality, size, low-beta, "hatedness" = short interest / days-to-cover). What style is Burry, in numbers?
- Does the style still pay? Test the systematic version — deep value + high FCF yield + contrarian (high short interest) — cross-sectionally, net of cost, with the base's purged K-fold / walk-forward bar. Value has been a decade-long null; does the contrarian overlay revive it, or is this hindsight?
- The short leg, honestly. Burry's shorts are his signature and his biggest risk. Test whether a rules-based "expensive + deteriorating + crowded-long" short adds anything, or whether — like the base's Brute-Force finding — you cannot fade the prop and the tail eats the edge.
- Concentration vs. governance. Burry runs a handful of large bets; the engine's crowding and single-name caps are the opposite instinct. Study the trade-off explicitly.
Full detail in research/README.md. The scorecard (Alpaca SIP, 2016–2026;
price-only proxies — no 13F/fundamentals):
| # | Question | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is the style, in numbers? | |
| 2 | Does buying the hated pay? | ❌ null — worst-3y +0.76 < loved +0.83 < equal-wt +0.86 < SPY +0.89; long/short spread Sharpe −0.00 |
| 3 | Is fading froth an edge? | ❌ regime, not edge — short-ARKK −27%/yr, −98% DD full period; +86% only in 2022; timed version still −0.75 |
| 4 | Concentration vs governance? | ❌ top-1 +19.9% CAGR but 44% vol / −58% DD / worse ret-per-DD than diversified — a ruin machine |
The synthesis: you cannot systematize Burry, and the honest attempt says so cleanly. The "contrarian, anti-momentum" value pillars are really ~1.0 beta / +0.6 momentum-correlated equity beta (none beat the market); buying the deeply hated (long-term reversal) is a flat null; the signature short of froth is a −98%-drawdown widow-maker that pays only in the 2022 unwind (the base's "you cannot fade the prop" law); and concentration lifts return and drawdown together, worsening risk-adjusted return — a ruin machine at top-1. His edge is discretionary timing + conviction + concentration, precisely what a governed process bounds away. What survives is not a Burry sleeve but two things the family already has: hard-asset diversification (gold) and tail insurance (Bleed). Burry joins Brute-Force and Backsliders on the honest shelf.
Research: first pass complete — a cautionary null (research/). The style is mostly beta, the
contrarian entry nulls out, the short is regime/ruin, and the concentration is uninvestable as process.
Tradable residue (gold, Bleed) already exists elsewhere in the family. No keeper, no live driver;
nothing validated to the spine's bar.
Blaque Baux is a quantitative research initiative and a subsidiary of Carter Warrens. BlaqueBaux.com is the home for the work; the code lives here on GitHub — open to study, test, and build bespoke strategies on top of.
Anyone can point an AI at a market. The edge is understanding what the data actually says — and turning it into something you can act on. We test relentlessly and put most of it on the record as rejected, with the reason; what survives is built, governed, and validated before it is ever called real. That combination — honest research, reproducible evidence, and execution you can trust — is why Carter Warrens leads on strategy and implementation, not merely uses the tools everyone now has.
This repo is one sleeve of the Blaque Baux family — a single governed engine steered in many directions. The core repo is the base/blueprint and holds the full family roster.
engine/ the Blaque Baux platform (git submodule -> blaquebaux/base)
research/ four Path-A sketches (pillars, reversal, froth-short, concentration) + scorecard
live/ governed live drivers (once a sleeve graduates to paper A/B)
MIT. (c) 2026 Carter Warrens.