Key points
- Michael Burry has bought Ero Copper (ERO) and calls it a mid-sized position. He disclosed it on his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, and the note went around X on September 21st, 2026. "All those back at the house are going to be needing a lot of copper," he wrote.
- It is an AI trade taken from the other end. Burry says he is "largely ignoring the woo-hoos" pushing AI higher while he buys the metal those data centres are wired with.
- ERO traded near $37 on September 22nd, 2026, up about 7% on the day and more than 110% in a year. Freeport-McMoRan gained 63% and Southern Copper 84% over the same twelve months.
- Not one insider has bought a share on the open market at any of his US-listed picks. Form 4 filings reviewed by InsiderBuying.com show zero open-market purchases at QXO, Sprouts Farmers Market and Zoetis, and $3.87 million of Sprouts selling since August 3rd.
The investor who shorted the housing market has spent a year warning about artificial intelligence. This week he told his readers what he is buying instead, and the first name on the list is a copper miner that digs in Brazil.
Michael Burry disclosed a new position in Ero Copper (ERO) on his Substack, Cassandra Unchained. He also bought QXO (QXO), the building-products consolidator run by Brad Jacobs, and added to Temple & Webster, Sprouts Farmers Market (SFM) and Zoetis (ZTS). The disclosure spread on X on September 21st, 2026, and ERO opened the next session about 7% higher.
What Burry actually said
Burry framed the position as the unfashionable side of the same trade everyone else is crowding into. "The house party is packed, pushing AI higher today, but I am largely ignoring the 'woo-hoos,'" he wrote. On copper itself he was blunter: "All those back at the house are going to be needing a lot of copper."
On the company, he said "Ero common does it for me" and described the holding as mid-sized. He credited the management team installed in early 2025 with delivering on "three rather difficult promises," and said a forensic review of the company's accounting "came up clean." He reads Ero as a higher-cost producer, which is the point: a miner with thinner margins gains the most if the copper price stays where it is. Even after the stock more than doubled, he argues it still trades at a substantial discount to the larger copper miners.
Why this miner, and why now
Ero Copper Corp. is a Vancouver company whose mines are all in Brazil. Its main asset is the MCSA Mining Complex in the Curaçá Valley of Bahia state, which produces copper concentrate with gold and silver recovered alongside it, and it owns the Boa Esperança project outright. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and in Toronto.
The timing sits on top of a copper market at record levels. Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange touched an all-time high near $14,875 a tonne on September 10th, 2026, and COMEX copper hit a record $6.89 a pound the day before, then sold off hard when a planned US tariff escalation on refined copper looked like it was losing momentum. A higher-cost producer is the leveraged way to bet that those prices hold.
The market has already noticed the sector. Our own price record puts ERO near $37 on September 22nd, 2026, against a $17.36 close a year earlier, a gain of more than 110%. Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is up 63% and Southern Copper (SCCO) is up 84% over the same twelve months. Burry is not early to copper. He is arguing that the cheapest way into it has not caught up.
The trade under the trade
Read alongside his short book, the position is less of a contradiction than it looks. Burry is betting against the companies selling the artificial intelligence story and for the physical inputs that get consumed whether or not the story works out. As the trader Shay Boloor put it in the post that carried the news to 155,000 readers on X, he is "basically short the building and long the wiring."
There is a limit to how far anyone can check this. Scion Asset Management deregistered with the SEC in late 2025, so there are no more quarterly 13F filings to hold the claims against. Everything Burry now says about his own book is self-reported to a newsletter with roughly 335,000 subscribers.
What the insiders did
What is on file is what the people who run these companies did with their own money, because officers and directors of US-listed companies have to report their trades within two business days. Form 4 filings reviewed by InsiderBuying.com show that none of them have been buying.
At QXO, 14 filings between January 15th and July 1st, 2026 are all awards, option conversions and shares withheld for tax. There is not one open-market purchase, and not one sale either. At Zoetis, our record holds a single filing this year: a gift of 6,650 shares by director Frank A. D'Amelio on August 7th, 2026.
Sprouts Farmers Market is the one where insiders acted, and they acted in the other direction. Six open-market sales worth $3,873,836 landed between August 3rd and September 8th, 2026. Chief executive Jack Sinclair made four of them, $3.64 million in all, at prices from $78.25 to $89.34. Director Joseph O'Leary sold $214,440 at $82.57. The stock traded near $70 on September 22nd, 2026, below every one of those prices.
Ero Copper files nothing at all in this record, and that is a fact about the plumbing rather than the company: as a Canadian issuer it reports to Canada's SEDI system, not on SEC Form 4s, so its insiders never appear in our data.
| Company | Price, Sep 22nd | 1-year return | Insider filings on record | Open-market buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ero Copper (ERO) | $37.05 | +113% | None (Canadian issuer) | Not applicable |
| QXO (QXO) | $12.55 | -37% | 14 since January 15th | 0 |
| Sprouts Farmers Market (SFM) | $69.90 | -42% | 10 since August 3rd | 0, and $3.87M sold |
| Zoetis (ZTS) | $72.32 | -50% | 1 (a gift) | 0 |
| Temple & Webster | ASX listed | Not in our record | None (Australian issuer) | Not applicable |
What that leaves
Four of the five names are wreckage. Sprouts has halved, Zoetis has halved, QXO is down more than a third and Temple & Webster is the worst of them. Only the copper miner has worked, and Burry bought it after it doubled rather than before. That is the shape of the bet: pay up for the thing the physical economy needs, and buy the out-of-favour rest while nobody wants them.
The gap worth watching is the one between what he is saying and what the insiders are doing. A newsletter position can be reversed in a week with nobody the wiser. A director buying stock has to say so in two days. On three of these four US-listed names, the people closest to the numbers have put no new money in at all, and at Sprouts they have been taking money out, above today's price, every few weeks since the summer.
Full filing records sit on the Ero Copper, QXO, Sprouts and Zoetis pages, and Insider Access members are alerted when an officer or director finally does step in.
Informational only, not investment advice.