Michael Burry

Michael James Burry (; born June 19, 1971) is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He founded the hedge fund Scion Capital which now goes by the name Scion Asset Management.

He is best known for being among the first investors to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis as well as paving the way for the GameStop short squeeze.

Early life and education

Burry was born and grew up in San Jose, California. He has Rusyn ancestry. At the age of two he lost his left eye to retinoblastoma and has had a prosthetic eye ever since. As a teenager, he attended Santa Teresa High School.

He studied economics and pre-med at the University of California, Los Angeles, earned an MD degree from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1997, and started but did not finish his residency in neurology at Stanford University Medical Center. While off duty at night, he worked on his hobby: financial investing.

Despite not practicing, Burry has kept his license as a physician active with the Medical Board of California, including continuing education requirements.

Investment career

After medical school, Burry worked as a Stanford Hospital neurology resident, and then a Stanford Hospital pathology resident.

He then left to start his own hedge fund. He had already developed a reputation as an investor by demonstrating success in value investing, which he wrote about on message boards on the stock discussion site Silicon Investor beginning in 1996. He was so successful with his stock picks that he attracted the interest of companies such as Vanguard, White Mountains Insurance Group and prominent investors such as Joel Greenblatt. Burry has a strictly traditional understanding of value. He has said more than once that his investment style is built upon Benjamin Graham and David Dodd’s 1934 book '' Security Analysis'': "All my stock picking is 100% based on the concept of a margin of safety."

After shutting down his website in November 2000, Burry started the hedge fund Scion Capital, funded by an inheritance and loans from his family. He named it after Terry Brooks' '' The Scions of Shannara'' (1990), one of his favorite novels. He quickly earned extraordinary profits for his investors.

In 2005, Burry started to focus on the subprime market. Through his analysis of mortgage lending practices in 2003 and 2004, he correctly predicted that the real estate bubble would collapse as early as 2007. His research on the values of residential real estate convinced him that subprime mortgages, especially those with "teaser" rates, and the bonds based on these mortgages, would begin losing value when the original rates were replaced by much higher rates, often in as little as two years after initiation. This conclusion led him to short the market by persuading Goldman Sachs and other investment firms to sell him credit default swaps against subprime deals he saw as vulnerable.

During his payments toward the credit default swaps, Burry suffered an investor revolt, where some investors in his fund worried his predictions were inaccurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Eventually, Burry's analysis proved correct: He made a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.

In 2008, Burry shut down Scion due to public backlash in response to his schemes and numerous audits from the Internal Revenue Service. Burry was also motivated to close Scion to focus on other investment ventures.

In an April 3, 2010 op-ed for ''The New York Times'', Burry argued that anyone who studied the financial markets carefully in 2003, 2004, and 2005 could have recognized the growing risk in the subprime markets. He faulted federal regulators for failing to listen to warnings from outside a closed circle of advisors.

In 2013, Burry reopened the Scion hedge fund under the name Scion Asset Management. Its aim was to generate personal investments, which include water, farmland, and gold.

Personal life

Burry is married and lived in Saratoga, California in 2010 with his two adult sons, one of whom was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, and Burry believes he himself also has Asperger’s after reading about the disorder. When he was younger, he noticed that it took him a lot of energy to look people in the eye, and said, "If I am looking at you, that's the one time I know I won't be listening to you".

He is a fan of heavy metal music, including bands such as Obituary, Lamb of God, Amon Amarth, Slipknot, King Diamond and Pantera.

Burry was highly critical of the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

In popular culture

Film

* Burry is portrayed by Christian Bale in the 2015 film '' The Big Short''.

Literature

* 2010: Michael Lewis, '' The Big Short''
* 2009: Gregory Zuckerman, '' The Greatest Trade Ever''

References

External links

"Michael Burry: Subprime Short-Seller No. 1,"
''The New York Times'', March 1, 2010
"Betting on the Blind Side"
Excerpt from "The Big Short"

"A Primer on Scion Capital’s Subprime Mortgage Short"
''Michael Burry, M.D.'' November 7, 2006

"Michael Burry’s FCIC Testimony – Audio"
FCIC Staff Audiotape of Interview with Michael Burry

"Scion Asset Management - Homepage"

"Scion Asset Management - Quarterly Holdings Reports"

{{DEFAULTSORT:Burry, Michael
1971 births
American financiers
American hedge fund managers
American investors
American money managers
American stock traders
Businesspeople from California
Living people
People from Saratoga, California
Physicians from California
Santa Teresa High School alumni
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine alumni
American people of Rusyn descent