Michael Burry bought fine wine as a dollar hedge. LiveTrade is how you buy it, and how you get out.

The Big Short investor has bought 40 wines as a hedge against the dollar and AI risk. Every one of them trades on LiveTrade, the most active marketplace for fine wine.

On 11 September, Michael Burry told his readers he had bought around 40 wines after screening roughly 700 of them, targeting an 18 to 20% discount to market. His reasoning, in his own words: "just about every single case of fine wine sitting in a London bonded warehouse can be a short position on the US dollar."

He set out a case built on fine wine's negative correlation to the dollar index over five-year periods, on supply that is destroyed continuously as bottles are drunk, and on prices that have fallen sharply from their October 2022 peak. He named Pétrus, Mouton Rothschild, Château Margaux, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Sassicaia, Ornellaia and Solaia.

What he is describing is unusual. A physical asset, held in a warehouse, with no counterparty risk, no further issuance of that vintage, and no settlement system that a quantum computer could break. A supply that only ever falls, because people drink it. And a price history that moves independently of equities and inversely to the dollar.

"Fine wine has always held real appeal as a store of value, but for most of its history it has been one of the harder markets to actually act in. What Burry is describing is an asset the trade has understood for generations. What has changed is not the thesis, it is the plumbing beneath it. LiveTrade has enabled the fine wine market to have a live, published, two-way price, and that is what turns a cellar into a position somebody can genuinely manage."

Matthew O'Connell, Co-CEO, Bordeaux Index

The catch, historically, was that physical assets are difficult to trade. That is the barrier we have been dismantling, with LiveTrade.

There is a second barrier, one the market rarely talks about: the assumption that to sell your wine through a merchant you must first hand that wine to the merchant to store. Bordeaux Index has lifted it. You do not need to store with us to trade on LiveTrade. If your wines sit in any bonded warehouse in the UK or the EU, you can list them on LiveTrade and sell them there. That matters more than it sounds. It means a collector is never captive to whoever happens to be holding their wine, and it means the prices on our LiveTrade screen reflect the whole market rather than our own inventory.

Bordeaux Index is the largest trader in the world on the fine wine secondary market. LiveTrade is our marketplace.

The question the thesis leaves open

Index data describes a market. It is not a market you can transact in. An index will tell you where fine wine has been. It will not tell you what you can buy a case of Sassicaia for this morning, what someone will pay you for it this afternoon, or how long it takes to find out.

For most of this market's history, that was the problem. A hedge you cannot exit is not a hedge, it is a collection. Exiting meant calling a broker, waiting for them to canvass their contacts, and discovering the price only after you had committed to selling. Anyone who thinks in basis points looked at that and, reasonably, went elsewhere.

That is not the market any more.

The wines he named are not theoretical

Every one of the seven wines Burry named trades on LiveTrade. Between them they have changed hands hundreds of times in the last three months alone, and the most liquid of them, Sassicaia, Mouton Rothschild and Château Margaux among them, trade many times a week with a firm bid and a firm offer on screen throughout. These are not valuations, estimates or asking prices. They are trades that clear, between a buyer and a seller who each saw the other's price before they committed.

Nor are there subscriptions or hidden charges. Every selling fee is shown on the screen in front of you, before you commit to anything.

On the most actively traded vintages, the gap between the bid and the offer is narrow enough that a buyer can take a position and know, within a modest margin, what they could sell it back for the same day. That is the practical test of whether something is a hedge or simply a possession.

Where those prices come from

LiveTrade is transparent by design. Every live bid and every live offer is published on screen, with the quantity available and the case format, to every client at the same time. There is no quote you have to ring up and ask for, no price that depends on who you are or how much you are spending, and no privileged tier that sees the book before you do. You can watch a wine for a year without ever trading it and see exactly what it was bid and offered at the whole way through.

That transparency is not a feature we bolted on. It is a consequence of the position we occupy. Bordeaux Index is the largest trader in the world on the fine wine secondary market, and LiveTrade is the most active marketplace for fine wine anywhere. The marketplace you are looking at aggregates the interest of a global client base, private clients, the trade and investors alike, with Bordeaux Index making prices into it. A market maker that publishes its bids has to stand behind them, which is precisely why the bid is worth something.

Around that sits the infrastructure the position requires: bonded storage, settlement, and My Portfolio, where clients hold, value and offer their own cases back into the same book they bought them from.

Three things an index cannot show you that LiveTrade can

It is in bond. Stock sits in a bonded warehouse under professional storage. No duty and no VAT are payable while it stays there, and none are payable at all if it is sold on in bond. Provenance and condition travel with the case.

There is a bid. Every wine on the screen has a buyer on the other side at a published price. You know your exit before you take the position, which is the entire difference between an asset and a hedge.

You can name your own price. You do not have to accept the offer in front of you. Decide what you are willing to pay, leave that bid sitting on LiveTrade, and if a seller decides to meet it, the trade happens. Burry screened 700 wines to find 40 at the discount he wanted. A resting bid does that waiting for you.

A market that has broadened, not retreated

Prices across fine wine have corrected hard since the 2022 peak. The response we have seen has been the opposite of retreat: more wines changing hands, more buyers on the book, and more activity year on year, not less. Volume rising as prices fall is not a market losing confidence. It is a market broadening.

Fine wine has a bid

The asset is three hundred years old. LiveTrade is not, and it is now an app. Bordeaux Index is the largest trader in the world on the fine wine secondary market, LiveTrade is the most active marketplace for fine wine, and every price we make is published to every client at once, on desktop and in the LiveTrade App.

Trade smarter with LiveTrade.

Download the LiveTrade App today.

Bordeaux Index is a fine wine merchant and trading platform. Nothing here is investment advice, and fine wine is not a regulated investment.