원문 보기
Around this time last year, Michael Burry, the man who called the 2008 crash, told his investors he was shutting down his fund. His reason was, and I quote: "My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets." That's finance bro speak for "I've been bagholding puts for years, the market refuses to crash, and I'm closing the account before I get margin called like Leopold." This is the guy who walked away from 2008 with about a hundred million dollars, and he's spent the years since shorting Tesla, tweeting "Sell" at his followers, betting a billion dollars against AI, and deleting his Twitter account every time he got caught bagholding.
But what if he'd taken that hundred million in 2008, put it all in the S&P 500, gone back to being a doctor, and never looked at a company’s balance sheet again? This question has been bugging my autistic brain for a while, but I’ve been busy euromaxxing in italy this past month so I didn’t have time to sit down and scratch that itch.
And now I finally have the time to go down the rabbit hole of SEC filings and excel spreadsheets. One big disclaimer before we get into it: Michael Burry’s fund was private, so nobody knows his real exact returns. I rebuilt his portfolio from public filings and a lot of assumptions, and I'll point out the ones that hurt him, because he has 300,000 Substack subscribers, and my channel has my brother and three bots watching.
Let’s start from the beginning, and by that I mean when Michael Burry first got into the markets. Because a person doesn’t really exist until they start losing money in the market casino. Burry quit a neurology residency at Stanford to start his fund, Scion Capital, in 2000. He never went back to medicine, but he kept the title.
He signed his investor letters "Michael J. Burry, M.D.," which is like a guy with a PhD in transgender feminism correcting the waiter for calling him "sir." In 2005 he decided the housing market was a bubble, so he bought credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. A credit default swap is basically insurance on a bond.
You pay a premium every year, and if the bond blows up, you get paid. For two years, the bonds didn't blow up. He paid premiums while home prices kept rising, and his investors got so angry they tried to pull their money out. He wouldn't let them. That's diamond hands with other people’s money, which is a whole different level of diamond hands.
Then 2007 happened, just like he said. From 2000 to mid-2008, Scion returned 489 percent after fees, while the S&P 500 made about 2%. He then took his hundred million and closed the fund. In 2010, Burry told Bloomberg what he was buying: gold, small tech stocks, and farmland "with water on site." Gold, farmland and water is what you buy when you think civilization is ending.
The small tech stocks were the hedge in case the world doesn't end I guess. And obviously the world didn't end. This is one of the many predictions Burry will make that will turn out to be completely wrong. At the same time, they made a movie about him, and Christian Bale got an Oscar nomination for playing him barefoot, drumming to heavy metal.
And just like that, a legend was born. He went from being the outcast wallstreet autist who calls himself M.D. to an S tier investment legend worshiped by the regards of wallstreet bets. In August 2019, his new fund owned about three percent of GameStop, at under four dollars a share, and Burry wrote to the board demanding a buyback.
So yeah, before there were millions of apes, there was one autist with a medical degree and a hundred million dollars yoloing into the soon to be meme stock. He'd paid about $3.32 a share, and by the end of November 2020 he'd sold everything at around $13.50. Four times his money, which is a great trade, until two months later, when WallStreetBets squeezed GameStop to 483 dollars.
Burry said later, "I had no idea that a Roaring Kitty existed." The man who held his swaps for two years while his investors screamed at him turned out to be a paper handed bitch afterall. I guess it’s much easier to diamond hands other people’s money than yours huh. In December 2020 he announced he was short Tesla, at around 568 dollars a share.
By October 2021, almost a year later, when he confirmed he was out, Tesla was at 843, up 48 percent against him. A month later Elon Musk called him a "broken clock," which is generous, because even a broken clock is right twice a day. Burry has predicted 38 of the last two crashes. He responded by deleting his account.
So at this point Burry is basically the bear version of Cramer. Cramer is bullish on everything, on live television, with sound effects. Burry is bearish on everything, on Twitter, and then he deletes his account. In 2023 someone launched an ETF that bets against Cramer's picks, and even that lost money.
Nobody has bothered making an inverse Burry ETF. Because it already exists. It's called the SP500. To be fair, 2022 was his year. SPY lost 18 percent, my model has him up 17%, and by midyear his only stock was a private prison company, which is the most Michael Burry investment I can imagine. Then on January 31st 2023, he posted one word, "Sell," and deleted his account again.
A week later he was back. And two months later he posted "I was wrong to say sell" and congratulated the dip buyers, and said: "there has been no BTFD generation like you." The S&P 500 finished the year up 24 percent. Now back to October 2025. Four days after he closed his fund, Burry came back to Twitter as Cassandra Unchained, the prophet who was always right and never believed, and posted that “the only winning move is not to play.” Cassandra’s problem was that nobody believed her.
Burry’s problem is that everyone does, except for the market. Three days later his last 13F came out: Michael Burry bets a billion dollars against AI. Puts on Palantir worth 912 million in underlying, and on Nvidia worth 187 million. That’s a proper degenerate move right there! So the only winning move was not to play, but he still played millions of dollars.
Some people just can’t help themselves in the casino. Then Burry did what every so-called prophet does once the scam is exposed, he pivots into the next grift. He started a newsletter at 379 dollars a year. Nobody knows how many of the 300,000 subscribers he has are paying, but if it’s just one in ten, that’s eleven million dollars a year, more than he spent on the Palantir puts.
The newsletter about the bubble is more profitable than actually trading against the bubble. So what does the prophet of the AI bubble do with all of that new subscriber money? He goes long Lululemon. In February, while Lulu was trading at $179, he wrote he was adding and called the price at $150 his “load up the truck” price.
By September it was his largest position, and it closed at $96. Eighteen years of warning about bubbles, and his biggest position is an overpriced yoga pants company. You can’t make this shit up. Okay, back to the original question. It’s January 2009, Burry has a hundred million dollars, and there are two possible versions of him.
Dr. Burry puts it all in the S&P 500 and goes back to the hospital. Michael the degen Burry does everything you just watched. Today, Dr. Burry would have 1.16 billion dollars. Michael the degen Burry on the other hand, by my estimations, has about 263 million. Now, in fairness to our dear Cassandra who cried wolf, part of that gap is my spreadsheet.
In the years with no filings, my model parks him in cash, and some of those were monster years, like 2013, when SPY did 32 percent. So let’s only count the years we actually have, 2019 through 2025. Burry is up 194 percent while SPY is up 203%. Seven years of shorting Tesla, calling tops and deleting his account, just to underperform an index fund.
And if we add 2026, where he went long overpriced yoga pants, he would only be up 157% in total against 243% from SPY. So after all of that, it’s pretty clear that this guy would have been better off just putting his money into an index fund and going out to touch grass. This just shows that being right once at the biggest moment in history might just be the most expensive thing that can happen to an investor, because you spend the rest of your career trying to chase that high, trying to catch that whale.
And by the end you’re burning millions in theta just to feel something. Dr. Burry would have been fine. He’d be a billionaire by now with absolutely no opinion on Palantir. Instead, Michael Burry is bag holding Lululemon and ranting about valuations on twitter. But hey, at least he finally figured out how to monetize his audience of regards, by selling them a gay bear doomer subscription at 379 dollars.
Comments 0