저자: MarkMoss · 외국인
요약 보기
마이클 버리의 과거 이력(2000~2008 성과, 빅쇼트, 이후 장기 약세 콜 실패)을 짚으며, 그의 현재 AI·비트코인 버블 경고는 낡은 가치투자 프레임워크에서 나온 것이라 주장. 유동성 중심 프레임이 더 설명력이 높으며 비트코인은 튤립이 아니라 인프라/담보 자산이라 주장. 공격적 매도 대신 시스템적 자산배분을 권고하고 1월 7일 세미나를 홍보.
다듬은 글
Michael Burry, the guy who called the 2008 crash, he's back. Now this time he's warning about the biggest crash in history. He's saying that AI, the stock market, Bitcoin, he says that all of that is going to crash. That AI is in a massive bubble. He said it's driven by hype and a circular financing.
He said that there's a handful of mega cap tech stocks that are holding up the entire market together and that when this breaks, speculative assets like Bitcoin are all going down. Now he's taking billion-dollar bets against names like Nvidia and Palantir. He's revived his old Cassandra persona and he's openly calling Bitcoin {quote} "worse than tulips".
If you know his history, then you should be paying attention. But before you decide whether this is actual insight or just another doomsday call, you need to understand how Michael Burry actually became famous. You need to know what his record looks like after that moment because this isn't really a Bitcoin story.
This is a framework story. So let's go. All right, so jumping right in, we want to understand Michael Burry the person and really we want to understand his origin story. So let's go back. He, you know, he's famous. He he's a good investor. But is he an oracle? So let's start right there because this is the part that matters.
Now Michael Burry didn't come out of nowhere, all right? He wasn't he wasn't dumb and he wasn't actually just lucky, right? In the sense of stumbling into something. He was he was smart he was really smart. He was disciplined. He believed in this thesis. He was a very good investor. He was trained actually as a medical doctor in neurology.
But instead of staying in medicine, he became obsessed with value investing, key piece, with value investing. Of course, that's Warren Buffett and the disciple of Benjamin Graham. Now Benjamin Graham is all about balance sheets. He's about cash flow. He's about reading filings line by line. So he started posting like all of his stock analysis on internet message boards, you know, back then like literally forums and people started noticing because his work it was good, right?
It wasn't flashy. It wasn't macro. It was deep fundamental analysis. Now in 2000, he launches Scion Capital and he had about a half a million dollars. Now most of that was just family money that he had. He had a couple early believers with him and over the next several years, Scion grew pretty steady, pretty rapidly.
By 2007, he managed roughly $600 million. So pretty good. Now his performance from 2000 to 2008, it was strong. He was averaging about 26% per year annualized. During that time it was about 500% cumulative. So that's impressive. But here's the part that people forget. Those returns, they they weren't unheard of back then, right?
Back then top value investors in that period like Joel Greenblatt for example, other deep value managers, plenty of funds during that period posted similar numbers coming out of the dot-com bust. So after big crash, we typically have another good run. And that was all before 2008. Up to 2008, at this point Burry, he wasn't famous, right?
He wasn't on TV. He wasn't like some macro oracle that people think he is today. He didn't break the Bank of England like George Soros did. He didn't predict a global monetary shift. He was just a disciplined stock picker. So he was good, but not legendary. Now his reputation didn't come from decades of flawless calls.
It came from one trade and that trade didn't make him famous because it was clean. It actually it made him famous because it almost destroyed him. You got to watch the movie The Big Short or read the book if you haven't already. It's a brilliant thesis that he had. Terrible timing. And it was a near-fatal bet.
So if you haven't seen the movie, you should, but this is where the legend was born. So around 2003 to 2004, Michael Burry, he's the value investor digging through the sheets, he's digging through mortgage data. Now at that time, there was a lot of adjustable-rate loans and they were doing like loans they were called no-doc lending.
They had these low introductory teaser rates and they'd be fixed for 12 or 36 months and then they'd reset higher. And to his credit, he sees that, right? He sees it early and he started calling out. He realized that the housing market isn't just overheated, it's structurally broken. Now when rates reset, then defaults are going to be inevitable.
That's what he figured. Now that insight turned out to be correct. So in 2005, he makes a very aggressive move. He pivots almost the entire Scion portfolio into credit default swaps. Now these are against the subprime mortgage bonds. So not stocks, not puts, all right? This is custom illiquid derivatives.
So basically what he's doing here is he's paying insurance premiums every single year and he's betting on the collapse. And here's what gets mostly glossed over by most people. He was way too early. And usually being early is the same as being wrong. And for almost 2 years, housing kept going up. It kept rising.
Banks they kept securitizing all this junk. The party kept going on, but in this meantime, Burry had to keep paying for this. So he's completely bleeding cash this whole time. In 2006, Scion is down nearly 19% in early 2007, it's down again. Every year he has to continue paying 20 to 30 million dollars just to keep this trade alive.
That's the thing when you're shorting it. That's why being early can be wrong because you're paying to stay in it. And while he's paying 20 to 30 million just to keep the trade alive, the S&P 500 is ripping higher. So during this whole time, over years, Michael Burry looks completely insane. As a matter of fact, the investors are panicking.
By mid-2007, about 92% of his fund tried to get their money back. They wanted to redeem, they wanted to get out of there. Over $500 wanted out. But he can't. He's he's stuck in the trades. These trades can't be unwound. So he does something that is probably the death blow no one would ever do. He freezes redemptions.
He basically tells his investors, "Sorry, you ain't getting your money back. I'm blo- I'm I'm shutting it down." Now of course, as you might imagine, they weren't happy about that. So lawsuits started flying, accusations were made, and there was a ton of stress. Financially, the fund, Michael Burry, they are capped out.
Personally, he was under extreme pressure. And by his own admission later, his timing was wrong, right? If Lehman Brothers collapses a little earlier or a little bit later, the trade didn't work out for him, right? Now The Big Short, it wasn't clean. It it was the correct thesis, but it was paired with the brutal timing.
Now a lot of the other funds that did the same thing during the same time, they didn't survive, right? Their partners pulled their funds out. Their funds their partners shut those trades down. But only because he, you know, paused redemptions, handled lawsuits, was he able to make it and that paired with a once-in-a-generation collapse, that's what saved him.
And that matters, all right? It matters because it tells you what that very moment trained him to do. All right, now after the fame, right? The record part that nobody talks about is that after 2008, Michael Burry, he shuts Scion down, all right? So at this point, he's burned out. He's emotionally wrecked, right?
I mean for years he was fighting this off, fighting his investors, dealing with lawsuits, and so he's done. He's done managing outside money plus the fact he made a bunch of money. So I guess he could take a break. Now when he comes back years later, the assumption is very simple. This is the guy, right?
This is the oracle. This is the guy who saw what was coming before anybody else. He was the guy that was right when everybody else was wrong. But when you actually look at the record after 2008, that assumption it completely falls apart. From 2010 onward, Michael Burry becomes consistently bearish, all right?
This is a key piece. Let's just walk through the facts here. So in 2010, he started warn- warning of this double-dip recession, but didn't happen. The S&P 500 finished up 15%, a big year. In 2015, he starts predicting that China would lead this market collapse and the markets wobbled a little bit, but then they recovered.
In 2017, he warned that rising rates were going to trigger a complete market meltdown. And what happened? The S&P 500 went up nearly 20% again another monster year. 2019, he called index funds the next subprime crisis. What happened? Markets rallied even through COVID and went on to post huge returns.
2020, he did a massive short against Tesla, thought he could do the same thing, short the housing bubble, and instead Tesla went up 700%. 700%. 2021, he calls Bitcoin a bubble. Bitcoin hits a new all-time high. 2023, he did a $1.6 billion bet against the S&P 500, a $1.6 billion short against the S&P 500 and it went up 20%.
2025, he called AI {quote} "a tulip mania", same thing he's saying now about Bitcoin. He shorts Nvidia, he shorts Palantir right before they explode higher. So from roughly 2014 to 2023, his fund underperforms the S&P 500 by 5 to 7% per year, okay? Like that's not a bad year. That's a bad decade. If you followed Michael Burry consistently after 2008, then you missed out on tech.
You missed out on liquidity. You missed out on Bitcoin. You missed one of the greatest bull markets we've ever had in history. And this isn't about mocking him. This isn't trying to say I'm smarter than him. It's about understanding a pattern here. And if you understand the macro picture, if you see why old frameworks keep failing, but you're not fully confident that your personal setup is aligned with that reality, well that's exactly what I'm covering in my live Wealth OS Accelerator workshop on January 7th.
It's not about market predictions, it's not hype, it's about building a personal wealth operating system. It's how you structure time, income, capital, and investments so you're not reacting to headlines anymore. Now, I'm just putting it on your radar. I'll put a link down below. I'll put it on the screen here if you want the details, but let's just get right back to the video here.
All right, cuz we want to understand the framework so we can understand where the failure was. And this is this is really the heart of the issue right here, okay? Again, Michael Burry isn't wrong because he's reckless. He's wrong because he's using the wrong framework. Again, he's a Benjamin Graham disciple.
What is that? Um intrinsic value, cash flows, discounting earnings. Now, that works when the money itself was stable. You see, but after 2008, the market stopped being driven by fundamentals. They became driven by liquidity. It's something you hear me talk about all the time. We're always looking at liquidity.
We're looking at balance sheets, capital flows, and scarcity. Now, this is exactly when the split started to happen. Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, price businesses, right? But then Stanley Druckenmiller, he realized that prices and flows mattered. Now, since 2008, Stanley Druckenmiller's framework has explained reality way better.
All right? Burry never made that shift, and that's why Bitcoin breaks his entire lens. From Burry's perspective, Bitcoin looks wrong, right? There's no cash flow, there's no earnings, uh it's it's a volatile price. Uh it has retail enthusiasm. And inside of this value investing framework, it it has to be a bubble, right?
There's no other way he can explain that, but Bitcoin was never meant to be priced like a stock, right? It it's monetary collateral. You see, he's comparing it to tulips, but tulips were ornamental. Bitcoin is infrastructural, right? Tulips didn't secure a network, Bitcoin does, right? Tulips didn't replace a broken base layer, a global settlement layer, but that's exactly what Bitcoin is doing.
So, when Michael Burry calls Bitcoin tulips, like he doesn't really understand the framework, right? He's revealing the limits of his own map. The other thing is that when you're constantly bearish, you're betting against human progress. You're also betting the fact that central banks will always continue to print more money.
And that's why the bears, while their math, while their research, while their analysis is correct, their conclusion continues to be wrong. But what do you do with this? What do you do with headlines like this when Michael Burry is saying this, right? Cuz again, like he made a big call, we should listen to him.
Well, first, don't panic. Number two, definitely don't sell. And you don't want to outsource your conviction to celebrity contrarians like this. Just cuz he got famous in a movie doesn't mean we should stop thinking and just follow what he's doing blindly, all right? Markets don't reward whoever sounds the smartest.
They reward who understands structure. And I know most of us shortcut our thinking process, and so we like to listen to people who sound smart, and they have lots of conviction, but it doesn't mean they're right. Okay? The markets reward who understands the structure, okay? Bitcoin isn't a trade that you time.
It's a response to this broken monetary system. It's scarcity in a world of dilution. As long as the governments are going to continue to print money, then we need another asset that's more scarce. As long as the governments of the world, the United States, continues to weaponize money, weaponize the financial system, then we need a neutral money in a pillarized world of finance, okay?
We need collateral that can't be printed. That's the trade. So, you stay disciplined, and let me just leave you with this. The biggest mistake people make isn't being wrong about Bitcoin, it's having no system, right? So, they jump from one headline, they jump to the next headline, they go from one expert to the next expert, they go from panic to conviction, and then back again.
They sell the bottom, they buy the top. That's not investing, okay? That's reacting. Now, on January 7th, I'm hosting a live wealth operating system accelerator workshop, and we're going to build the opposite of that. We're going to walk through how real wealth is actually engineered, not guessed. We're going to talk about how to structure your cash flow, capital, and investments for this environment, and how to stop outsourcing your confidence to people on Twitter or CNBC, okay?
This is for people who don't want another option, they want a framework they can run for the next decade. Now, if you're serious about financial sovereignty, long-term positioning, or building wealth that doesn't depend on being right every week, then I'll see you there. We'll put a link down below. January 7th, build the system, or stay stuck reacting to it.
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