Burry's median trade annualizes up. Buffett's and Li Lu's annualize down
Median IRR is usually the smaller number next to a median raw return, because a long hold compresses a big total into a modest yearly pace. Michael Burry's disclosed record runs the other way: his median trade returned only 5.7 percent, and annualized it reads 18.3 percent, more than three times larger, because the trade closed in three months rather than years.
Michael Burry's typical disclosed trade returned 5.7475 percent. Annualized, that same typical trade reads 18.3191 percent, more than three times the raw figure. That is backwards from how this pairing usually reads on this site: a median return getting smaller once it is annualized, not larger.
The usual direction, and why it goes that way
Warren Buffett's typical disclosed trade returned 15.0096 percent. Annualized, it reads 4.7492 percent, less than a third of the raw figure. Li Lu's typical trade returned 26.9721 percent, annualizing to 7.6630 percent, also less than a third. Tenachine's guide on Buffett's Mastercard position already shows this same compression on a single large trade, 1125.51 percent held 15.25 years reading 17.86 percent a year. The mechanism does not change with the size of the trade. A return spread across several years divides down to a yearly pace smaller than the total, and Buffett's median holding period is 3.125 years, Li Lu's 2.625, long enough for that division to matter.
Why Burry's runs the other way
Burry's median holding period is 0.25 years, three months, the shortest of the three tracked investors with a full per-trade record. Tenachine's guide on his trade-to-holdings ratio already shows this same fast-turnover style from a different angle, 170 disclosed trades against only 3 stocks held now. A trade held three months does not need to shrink when it is annualized, it needs to be multiplied up to estimate what a full year of that pace would look like, and 5.7475 percent compounded up from a quarter to a year is most of the way to the 18.3191 percent actually published. The same arithmetic that shrinks a multi-year Buffett trade inflates a three-month Burry trade, because the direction of that arithmetic depends entirely on which side of one year the holding period falls.
What this changes about reading either number
Read Burry's 18.3191 percent alone and it looks like his typical position outperforms Buffett's 4.7492 percent by a wide margin. Tenachine's guide on the median IRR ranking already states this comparison plainly, Burry second of 76 tracked investors by this measure, Buffett outside the top ten. Read the raw median trade instead and the order flips: Buffett's 15.0096 percent beats Burry's 5.7475 percent by more than double. Neither ranking is wrong. Median IRR rewards a trade for compounding fast, regardless of how large the underlying move was. A raw median return rewards the size of the move itself, regardless of how long it took. Burry's short holding period is a real, disclosed fact about how he trades, not a flaw in the annualized figure, and the same is true of Buffett's and Li Lu's much longer one.
This is not a claim that a short holding period beats a long one, or that either measure should be read instead of the other. It is a reminder that the two figures answer different questions, and checking which direction the annualization moved a return, up or down, is the fastest way to tell which question a headline number is actually answering. All three figures come from disclosed 13F trades that lag real positions by up to a quarter, and past performance does not predict future results for any of the three investors compared here.