The story of Michael J Burry the neurodivergent stock exchange savant

https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/1510821172518301702

For those of you who didn't watch The Big Short or follow stonks at all, Michael J Burry is one of the first people to predict the 2008 sub prime mortgage crisis, and took massive advantage

TLDR: guy is an neurodivergent rich af chad similar to notch :marseyautism: but minus the incel shit and doesn't have to care what anyone thinks anymore and just tweets inane shit with grunge rock clips at the end for a week until it all gets deleted

So the guy started out as most neurodivergent do, never fitting in. He lost his right eye to cancer as a kid which made him even more avoidant. He didn't know he had autism but he focuses on his studies, got an MD at Vandy, and eventually started a residency at Standford. The insane hours and medical learning wasn't enough and didn't interest him however, so he used the hospital computer to post on a early stock trading advice forum that emphasizing calculated efficient investing. He made such a name for himself that prominent investment firms reached out to him to fund his own hedge fund Scion Capital (named after a fantasy novel of course). He continued to beat average rates of return year after year. :marseylongpost:

Eventually he got interested in the subprime market. This is how I understand it: Smaller banks were enticed by the giant ones to give out loans with shitty terms which started out from the US government push for Americans for Homes or whatever the frick they called it. They ranged from deceiving starting teaser rates to straight up pay nothing for a year until they frick you in the butt rates loans that could never possibly be paid back. These shitty loans were then bundled together with other loans and reevaluated by ratings agencies who were also incentivized to push them through, and given better score due to "diversity" and called them Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) or their derivatives Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). People then were allowed to invest in these just like a bond. He meticulously went through these records and realized it was 90% garbage unpayable shit and that if a certain percentage of these loans failed, the whole bundle would as well. This was in like 2006 :marseysal:

So what do you do, the backbone of the US economy is based on nothing mortgages, no one was listening to you, and there was no direct way to make money off them failing. He then invoked the "Credit Default Swap". This was usually used between two giant banks giving eachother a loan and a third party would insure just in case anything happened which everyone knew wouldn't happen. Well Michael amended the documents himself to apply to MBSs and went to the giant banks to basically buy insurance on their shitty bundles. If the bundle failed, he would get paid out the full value of it. Most of them laughed him out of the room, but a few took him up on the offer thinking they just scored an easy couple hundred mil :marseysmug3: :marseyclueless:

A few years went by and nothing happened. His investors were furious and wanted to pull out and tried to sue him. He locked the accounts saying something will happen just give it 2 weeks. This went on and on until he was paying so much in interest he basically had to fire his entire staff. But others eventually caught on and it did indeed happen. He personally made 100 million dollars and 700 million for his fund, recording a profit margin of almost 500%. However he pissed off a lot of people and was basically blacklisted by big investment firms for calling them out and investors for playing hardball. He's doing well however as what every wall street bets losers wishes they could be. Has an asian wife too :truestorybro:

In reference to my link, he now just tweets rightoid nonsense with a grunge youtube link for a week then wipes his account every 6 months. Hope he's doing okay :marseycarp:

more contemporary note: He invested heavily in Gamestop around 2019 using his tried and trued "value" investing strategy that made him big in the first place. The company was undervalued as people obviously thought brick and mortar video game stores would go the way of blockbuster. He used his massive investment to push for being not r-slurred and get a change of management. The stock grew but hedge funds doubled down. Reddit caught wind and the rest is history. How much was actually a short squeeze, idk. More technical analysis from bronance: gme was heavily shorted at the beginning but shorts got btfo at around $50 and covered, most of the action afterwards are retail buying, institutions momentum chasing, and market makers delta hedging their short call options.

lets see if we can get him interested

https://x.com/bigbooba8/status/1511218567529865219

inb4 it gets deleted

https://i.rdrama.net/images/16841354999162881.webp

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The degree to which anyone was actually malicious and planned anything is a point of debate, personally I think they're all just idiots, but basically correct

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CMV: Subprime crisis mostly derived (:marseytroublemaker:) from the complete opacity of the various "innovative" collateralized securitization units that arose like MBSs. When nobody has any idea wtf they are investing in, accurate risk assessment is impossible. It's irrelevant whether there was malice involved in issuing the shit loans because the market incentivized that exact thing so it would have happened eventually even if everyone acted in good faith.

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I don't know anything about finance, but I've learned to be extremely skeptical of "innovations". If you haven't recently had some massive scientific breakthrough in a field, innovation usually means reinventing the wheel at best and a scam at worst. "Innovative" defense procurement got us the JSF, Zumwalt, and LCS disasters. Innovators in IT have given us a billion more acronyms for stuff that hasn't changed that much in decades. So when it comes to something like lending money that people have been doing since prehistory, I'm a bit skeptical that anything new has been invented. It's like claiming that there's a new kind of prostitution that hasn't been invented yet.

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The F 35 came out as pretty good it’s just that the development was heck.

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fricking PREACH. still using 1990 active directory at work

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My current company is investing heavily in researching alternative database strategies and I am (currently) the only one to hedge my bets on tried-and-true relational databases. Like, y'know, the shit from the 80's. I am going to feel very smug when we end up using AWS Aurora databases as """innovation""" in a few months.

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Waterfallcels keep seething at Agilechads.

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F 35 is good actually

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It is now, but only after vast cost overruns and delays during development.

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that's exactly how I feel but I'm too drunk to put into words and worried people who aren't obsessed with stupid shit like this wouldn't get that

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They’re like 90% Ivycels so it stands to reason they’re all :marseyretard2:

All the smart ones are MIT grads with PhD’s working at Renaissance

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Yea that seemed to be one of the more unclear points in my reading about this but it's easier and probably more correct to just blame greed and incompetency. The people making the decisions at the top level or crafting the insane securities were completely detached from what was happening in the room of mom and pop loans with joanne and billy

I'm glad it's somewhat coherent/correct :marseyhappytears:

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No, they just needed to make their retirement number and punch out. A thin veil of ignorance is all they needed to have no legal exposure whatsoever.

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People always like to assign an evil actor to anything bad so they can make sense of why it happened. I always get skeptical when people start talking about big groups like 'wall street' as if they're all colluding to do something 'bad'.

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Living by hanlon’s razor is the only way to prevent becoming an agendaposting twink

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