13F Put and Call Options: How to Read a Filing Like Burry’s

On November 3, 2025, Scion Asset Management filed a Form 13F-HR for the quarter ended September 30, 2025, showing a $912.1 million notional put position against Palantir Technologies and a $186.6 million notional put against Nvidia. Within hours, the number was everywhere: “Burry bets $1.1 billion against AI.” Reading 13F put and call optionscorrectly means knowing what the SEC actually requires managers to disclose about options — and what that $912.1 million figure does and doesn’t represent.

This piece walks through the SEC’s own reporting rules for options on Form 13F, reads Scion’s real filing line by line so you can see the format yourself, explains why “notional value” is not money at risk, and covers the gaps — short stock, written options, swaps — that never show up on any 13F options review, no matter how carefully you read it.

What Form 13F Actually Requires You to Report

Before the options mechanics make sense, the baseline is worth resetting. Under Rule 13f-1, any institutional manager exercising investment discretion over accounts holding at least $100 million in Section 13(f) securities on the last trading day of any month must file a Form 13F within 45 days of each calendar quarter’s end. Our guide to reading Form 13F covers that mechanic in full.

What’s reportable is not every security a manager holds — it’s whatever appears on the Official List of Section 13(f) Securities, a list the SEC republishes every quarter. That list is almost entirely exchange-listed U.S. stocks, closed-end fund shares, and ETF shares — and, critically, it includes separate CALL and PUT line entries for many of those same issuers. That detail matters more than it looks: it’s the mechanism that makes options reporting possible at all. A manager can only report a put or call on a stock that is itself on the Official List for that quarter.

How 13F Put and Call Options Show Up — and How They Don’t

Form 13F’s own instructions spell out exactly how an options position is supposed to look on the Information Table. The rule is counterintuitive the first time you read it: a put or call line is notreported in terms of the option contract at all. It’s reported in terms of the stock underneath it.

The SEC’s Form 13F FAQ adds the rule that trips up most casual readers of this data: managers may report put or call options they hold on securities included on the Official List, but the FAQ is explicit that they should not report options they write— meaning options they have sold. A hedge fund can be running a large covered-call income strategy or selling naked puts against a stock, and none of it will appear anywhere on its 13F. The form only ever shows one side of the options book: what a manager owns, never what a manager has sold.

Case Study: Burry’s Bet Against Nvidia and Palantir

Scion’s actual infoTable.xml on EDGAR shows exactly the format above, in real entries rather than a hypothetical. Three line items stand out:

Notice the Halliburton line: a call, not a put. It’s a useful corrective to the “Burry is betting on collapse” framing that dominated coverage — the same 13F that carries two large bearish AI positions also carries a bullish call position, because a 13F options table reports direction position by position, not as a single fund-wide thesis. Each of the three lines in Scion’s filing also carries the designation DFNDfor investment discretion and reports zero shares under sole, shared, or no voting authority — because an option contract, unlike the stock underneath it, carries no voting rights to disclose in the first place.

Notional Value Is Not the Same as Money at Risk

The $912.1 million figure is the notional valueof the Palantir put — the exercise value of the 5,000,000 underlying shares the contracts control, not the premium Scion actually paid to open the position. Those are structurally different numbers for an out-of-the-money options position. As The Motley Fool reported, “the exercise value of these options contracts (the notional value) can potentially differ, by a lot, from the nominal value Burry outlaid to make these wagers.” The 13F itself has no line for the premium paid — the Column 4 value is always the exercise value of the underlying shares, whatever the contract actually cost to open.

This is the single most important habit to build when reading 13f put and call options: the Column 4 value on an options line tells you how large the bet would be if exercised at that share count, not how much cash the manager put down. It doesn’t take much capital to control a lot of notional exposure through far out-of-the-money contracts — which is exactly why a $912.1 million headline number and a far smaller premium paid can both be true descriptions of the same filing, even without either figure being disclosed on the form itself.

The Blind Spots: Short Stock, Written Calls, and Swaps

Even a perfectly careful reading of every options line on a 13F still misses most of how a fund can express a view through derivatives. The SEC’s FAQ confirms that short stock positions are excluded from Form 13F entirely — not reported, and not even netted against a long position in the same issuer if a manager happens to hold both. Written (sold) options are excluded the same way, as covered above.

Swaps are the widest gap of all, because they aren’t Section 13(f) securities at all — they’re a private contract with a bank counterparty, not a position in the stock itself. As a Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance analysis lays out, this lets an investor build real economic exposure to a company with nothing showing up in any 13F information table. In one documented case involving a retail-sector target, a bank counterparty’s disclosed equity stake fell as an activist investor’s swap-based economic exposure to the same company grew over the surrounding quarters — and the activist’s own Schedule 13D didn’t surface until roughly six weeks after the relevant quarter’s end. The 45-day 13F lag plus an unreported swap can obscure a real position build for months at a time.

How to Read a Put or Call Line on EDGAR Yourself

You don’t need a terminal to check any of this. The raw data is free on EDGAR:

1. Search the manager’s name on EDGAR’s full-text search and open its most recent Form 13F-HR filing.
2. Open the filing index and select infoTable.xml — the Information Table itself.
3. Find the <putCall> tag on each line item. If it’s absent, the line is an ordinary stock holding.
4. Check <sshPrnamt> for the underlying share count the contract controls — not a number of contracts.
5. Check <value> and remember it’s notional, not premium paid.

Scion’s Halliburton line is a good line to practice on precisely because it runs against the popular narrative: a $61.5 million notional call position covering 2,500,000 underlying shares, filed in the same table as the Palantir and Nvidia puts. Reading the raw table, rather than a headline summarizing it, is the only way to see that a single 13F can carry both bearish and bullish options exposure at once.

When a Fund Disappears From the Data Entirely

There’s a broader version of the disclosure gap worth knowing about, and Scion is a live example of it. Sherwood News reported that Scion’s SEC investment-adviser registration was terminated effective November 10, 2025 — a week after that Q3 13F was filed. Scion had reported roughly $154.93 million in assets under management on its last Form ADV in March 2025. In an October 27, 2025 letter to investors, Burry wrote that “my estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets,” and on November 25 he publicly teased being “on to much better things” without directly addressing the shutdown.

Deregistration means Scion is no longer required to file anythingwith the SEC, including future Form 13Fs. That’s a structurally different kind of gap from the confidential-treatment loophole that lets a manager delay disclosure of a single position for up to a year. A deregistered adviser doesn’t delay disclosure — it exits the 13F system entirely, and whatever it does next with client or personal capital may never surface in this dataset again.

What This Means for Reading Institutional Signals

None of this is a reason to ignore 13F options data — it’s free, public, and genuinely informative about what large managers hold. It is a reason to read it with the SEC’s actual rules in mind rather than the headline someone else wrote about it. A large notional value tells you how big a position would be at exercise, not how much capital is actually committed. A quarter with no put or call lines at all doesn’t mean a manager has no options exposure — it might mean every position is written, short, or held through a swap that never had to be disclosed. And a manager that stops filing 13Fs altogether hasn’t necessarily stopped trading; it may have simply stepped outside the reporting system that made its trades visible in the first place. A 13F options line is a starting point for research, not a complete accounting of what a fund actually owns.