Michael Burry
The Big Short
Scion Asset Management
Michael Burry lost his left eye to retinoblastoma as a toddler, studied medicine at Vanderbilt, completed his residency at Stanford, then quit to become a hedge fund manager — because that's what normal people do. He started Scion Capital from a blog about value investing that attracted attention from Joel Greenblatt. In 2005, Burry became obsessed with the subprime mortgage market, reading thousands of individual mortgage-backed securities prospectuses (literally no one else was doing this). He realized the housing market was a house of cards and bet against it using credit default swaps. Banks laughed at him. His investors tried to pull their money. He was proven spectacularly right in 2008, returning 489% to investors while the world burned. He now runs a small fund, makes cryptic one-tweet predictions, and deletes them shortly after.
“I look at the data and I see what the data tells me. I'm not influenced by what other people think. The consensus is almost always wrong at the extremes.”
Subprime mortgage short (2005-2008) — credit default swaps against MBS
Scion returned 489%. Burry personally made ~$100M. Banks lost hundreds of billions.
GameStop long (2019-2020) — was early but sold too early
Bought GME at ~$4, sold before the Reddit squeeze to $480. Left hundreds of millions on the table.
“I'm a numbers guy. I look at what the numbers tell me. Everything else is noise.”
“People say I didn't warn them enough about the housing crisis. I did. They just didn't listen.”
“The stock market is not the economy.”
Born in San Jose, California
Quits neurosurgery residency to start Scion Capital
Begins buying credit default swaps against subprime mortgages
The Big Short pays off — Scion returns 489%
Michael Lewis publishes 'The Big Short'
Buys GameStop, writes letter to board about share buybacks
Bets against S&P 500 and Nasdaq with $1.6B in puts
| # | Ticker | Name | Shares | Value | % Port |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PALAN | PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES INC | 5.0M | $912.1M | 66.0% |
| 2 | NVDA | NVIDIA CORPORATION | 1.0M | $186.6M | 13.5% |
| 3 | PFIZE | PFIZER INC | 6.0M | $152.9M | 11.1% |
| 4 | HALLI | HALLIBURTON CO | 2.5M | $61.5M | 4.5% |
| 5 | MOLIN | MOLINA HEALTHCARE INC | 125.0K | $23.9M | 1.7% |
| 6 | LULUL | LULULEMON ATHLETICA INC | 100.0K | $17.8M | 1.3% |
| 7 | SLM | SLM CORP | 480.1K | $13.3M | 1.0% |
| 8 | BRUKE | BRUKER CORP | 48.3K | $13.1M | 1.0% |
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