저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
마이클 버리가 2008년 이후 가장 공격적인 약세 베팅(풋옵션 중심, 포트폴리오 90%)을 취했다고 소개. S&P500 PER ~28(평균 15), 버핏지수 ~201%, 장단기 금리차 역전 후 정상화 국면, 경기지표 악화를 근거로 대폭락 가능성을 제기. 다만 타이밍의 어려움과 분산·유동성 유지 등 신중한 대응을 강조하며 폭락 여부는 단정하지 않음.
다듬은 글
All I see is every now and then there's some explosion on Twitter about you. And it's wrong. They're all wrong. I always thought Michael Burry only made a once-in-a-generation bet. I always believed that after 2008, he had made his call and moved on. But right now, Michael Burry has placed his most aggressive bearish wager since the 2008 financial crisis.
His fund held a portfolio that was 90% put options. Direct bets that the entire market falls. He has done more selling than buying over the past 2 years. And he posted a single-word warning online. Then deleted it. Either Burry has finally lost the plot in his old age. Or he knows something the rest of the market is completely missing.
We have got a lot of ground to cover. By the end of this, you will understand exactly what Michael Burry sees. And why it could matter for your money. But first, one critical question. Is Michael Burry preparing for a crash like 2008? The first ingredient we need to look at is the actual price of stocks right now.
Here is the fundamental rule of markets. When prices are far above their historical average, they are far more likely to fall back down. One of the best tools we have for this is the S&P 500 P/E ratio. The S&P 500 is made up of the 500 largest and most well-known companies in America. The P/E ratio compares the price you pay for a stock to the earnings that the stock gives you in return.
Think of it as the multiple you are paying for every single dollar of profit a company makes. Right now, the S&P 500 P/E ratio sits at around 28. The historical average throughout all of modern market history is approximately 15. That means right now, you are paying nearly double the historical average to own a slice of American companies.
One thing is absolutely clear. We are in a historically expensive market. And Michael Burry has been tracking these numbers very carefully. But there is another indicator that paints an even more alarming picture, and Burry knows it well. It is called the Buffett indicator. This ratio compares the total market value of all US stocks to the country's GDP.
Anything below 84% is considered significantly undervalued. Anything above 156% is considered significantly overvalued. Right now, this indicator sits at approximately 201%. Before the 2008 financial crisis, it stood at just 105%. Even before the dot-com bubble of 2000, it was only 138%. Today, it is almost double the level it reached before the last great financial crisis.
And it is already beginning to tell us exactly why Michael Burry might be so concerned. Since 1981, the US stock market has been on essentially a one-way ticket upward. The S&P 500 went from just 346 points all the way to over 6,000 points. But why has this actually happened? From 1981 to 2022, US interest rates fell from 19% down to nearly 4%.
This is not a coincidence. There is a concept that Michael Burry and every serious investor understands on a very deep level. Low interest rates act like removing gravity from asset prices entirely. When borrowing money is cheap, capital floods into stocks, real estate, and every other asset class. Prices rise, not necessarily because companies are worth more, but because cheap money has to go somewhere.
But when interest rates rise sharply, gravity snaps back into place with full force. The Federal Reserve raised rates from near 0% in early 2022 to over 5.25% by 2023, the most aggressive hiking cycle in over 40 years. Michael Burry has specifically called out the danger this poses to a market built entirely on cheap money.
He has posted warnings about Federal Reserve policy and its impact on asset valuations on multiple public occasions. If rates remain elevated, the gravitational pull on inflated stock prices will only intensify over time. The pressure is already beginning to show up in the economic data. But wait, this is not the most dangerous signal that Burry keeps returning to.
There is something in the bond market that has a near perfect historical track record, and right now it is signaling very loudly. It is called the yield curve. The yield curve has accurately predicted every single US recession since 1969. Every single one. Here is how it works. Normally, longer-term government bonds pay more interest than shorter-term ones.
That makes perfect sense. Lend your money for longer, expect to get paid more in return. But when investors become deeply worried about the near future, this relationship flips. Short-term bonds start paying more than long-term ones. That is the inversion, and historically, a recession follows. In 2022 and 2023, the yield curve inverted to its deepest level since the energy crisis of 1980.
It reached as low as -1.88% far deeper than anything seen before the 2008 crash. And here is the part most people completely overlook. The recession does not arrive during the inversion. It arrives when the yield curve begins to normalize, when it uninverts. That is when the clock truly starts ticking.
Historically, the time between the start of inversion and the beginning of a recession has ranged from 6 to 24 months. Right now, the yield curve is in the early stages of exactly that normalization. Michael Burry has studied these macro patterns throughout his entire career. He knows from 2008 that the biggest risks are the ones people dismiss first.
Combined with overvalued stocks and elevated interest rates, this creates a picture Burry has seen before. And the last time he saw it, it ended in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Let's now look at what the broader economic data is actually saying. S&P Global tracks nine leading indicators to assess whether a US recession is approaching.
In their most recent report, four of those nine were signaling red, indicating negative growth conditions. Those four are the term spread, consumer sentiment, manufacturing new orders, and bank lending practices. Consumer sentiment moved back into the 50s territory as people grew increasingly worried about the next 12 months of business conditions.
And when people become genuinely worried, they pull back on spending. When spending falls, corporate revenues follow. When revenues fall, companies start cutting jobs. This is the chain reaction that turns a slowdown into a full recession. Unemployment, while still relatively contained, has been ticking upward from its post-pandemic lows.
Unemployment tends to fall gradually through an expansion and then spike sharply when recession arrives. We are now beginning to see those early cracks form in the labor market data. Michael Burry has pointed to these precise macro signals publicly and consistently. He has argued repeatedly that the US economy is far more fragile than the mainstream financial media suggests.
When you combine historically expensive stocks, the fastest rate hike in 40 years, a yield curve now normalizing, and weakening economic data, you have the exact cocktail of conditions that Burry identified before 2008. And this brings us to the most critical part of this entire story. What is Michael Burry actually doing with his own money right now?
Here is where the story becomes genuinely alarming. Instead of just listening to what Burry says, let us look at what he is actually doing. Because for investors, actions speak far louder than any words. And Michael Burry's actions over the past 2 years have been incredibly loud. In the 13F regulatory filing for quarter 2 of 2023, Scion Asset Management disclosed its full positions to the SEC.
The total disclosed portfolio was valued at approximately $1.7 billion. A staggering 90% of that entire portfolio was in put options, direct bets that markets fall. He had put options against the S&P 500 ETF worth approximately $886 million. And put options against the Invesco QQQ ETF worth approximately $738 million.
Together, that is a single concentrated directional bet of nearly $1.6 billion that the market goes down. These are not cautious hedges or small insurance policies. This is an enormous high conviction bet against the entire market. Now, consider who this man actually is. This is the same investor who shorted the entire US housing market before 2008.
He was publicly ridiculed for years while his trade sat deep in the red. His own investors tried desperately to pull their capital out of his fund. He locked them in because he had done the deep fundamental work and was certain. When the collapse finally arrived, he made approximately billions for Scion Capital and became one of the most closely watched investors in the world.
When someone with that track record makes a bet of that scale, you should at least want to understand the reasoning behind it. But it does not end there. He has done more selling than buying for two consecutive years running. This is extraordinarily unlike the Michael Burry who built his reputation hunting deeply undervalued ignored companies.
The man who spent years reading hundreds of financial statements in search of what nobody else would touch. Now he holds almost nothing long. So what is it that he sees? He has compared today's market conditions directly to the late 1990s just before the dot-com bubble erased trillions in wealth. And he explicitly compared the explosion of passive index fund investing to the collateralized debt obligations of 2007.
Products that appeared safe hiding catastrophic underlying risk. And just like before 2008, most people today are not remotely concerned. That more than anything else is precisely what worries Michael Burry most. So here we are. Expensive stocks, elevated interest rates, a yield curve normalizing after its deepest inversion in decades, and weakening economic data.
And the man who called the 2008 crash has placed his biggest bearish bet in over 15 years. What should the average investor actually do right now? Here is the honest truth and even Burry himself would acknowledge this. Timing the market is nearly impossible to do consistently. His own 2008 bet was early by almost two full years.
During that time, his investors demanded their money back. The banks tried to change the terms of his contracts while he waited. He nearly lost everything before being proven spectacularly right. Most people simply do not have the financial cushion or emotional temperament to hold through that kind of sustained pain.
Burry himself does not recommend that ordinary investors try to replicate his exact strategy. So, what can we genuinely take away from all of this? First, truly understand the environment you are currently investing in. You do not need to short the market the way Burry does. But knowing that valuations are historically stretched should make you far more careful and selective about where you put your money.
Precision and patience matter far more in expensive markets than in cheap ones. Second, stop dismissing macro signals. The yield curve, interest rates, and recession indicators are not abstract numbers for economists to argue about. They directly affect the earnings, revenues, and share prices of every company inside your portfolio.
Third, maintain meaningful liquidity. Not because cash is a great long-term investment. It is absolutely not. But because market crashes create the greatest buying opportunities of a generation. The best time to buy quality assets at exceptional prices is when everyone else is rushing to sell. That is only possible if you have capital left to actually deploy when that moment arrives.
Fourth, think critically about what is actually inside your index funds. If Burry is right about the passive investing distortion, blindly buying index funds without understanding their composition carries far more hidden risk than most retail investors currently appreciate. Know what you actually own.
Do not outsource your thinking entirely to the market. So, is a crash coming? Honestly, nobody knows. Not me, not the Wall Street analysts, and frankly, not even Michael Burry himself. He has been wrong before. He has been painfully early before. But he has also been spectacularly right. When every other smart person in the room said he was completely wrong.
And the difference between those two scenarios was the 2008 financial crisis. What we can say with real confidence is this. Stock prices are stretched well beyond their historical norms and either Burry is wrong and this is all just noise or the signals he has spent his entire career learning to read are telling him something genuinely important.
The market has a long and consistent history of ignoring warnings right up until it simply cannot anymore. We do not know what happens next but given everything we have covered today it is probably worth paying very close attention. And if you want to go deeper click on this is what always happens before a market crash where we break down exactly what history tells us comes next.
Comments 0