“He’s been right before. Few listened back then. They made a whole movie about it. Now, he sees trouble looming on the horizon again.”
These ominous words come from Business Insider and they refer to Michael Burry, the investor made famous by The Big Short. Burry recently deregistered his hedge fund but remains a vocal contrarian, now airing his bearish perspectives on AI stocks such as Nvidia on his new Substack, Cassandra Unchained ($379, or about €327, annually).
Burry sees parallels with the late-1990s tech bubble and is unconvinced by reassurances from today’s policymakers, viewing them as no more reliable than Alan Greenspan’s famously misplaced dismissal of US housing bubble concerns.
Critics dismiss Burry as a one-trick pony, which is arguably harsh. He shorted tech during the dot-com bust and bought value stocks, predicted the subprime crash, and flagged 2021’s GameStop frenzy. Contrarian voices such as his remind investors to question euphoria.
However, he is no all-seeing prophet, and many of his warnings have been spectacularly off-target. In 2019 he foresaw a crash in passive investing. “Like most bubbles, the longer it goes on, the worse the crash will be,” he warned.
In 2021 he warned of “the greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things”.
In 2022 he suggested the S&P 500 could halve and fall below 1,900 in coming years, but 3,500 was as low as it got, and the index is near 7,000 today.
In February 2023, he issued a one-word tweet: “Sell.”
In these and other cases, buying the S&P 500 would have been far more profitable – six‑month returns averaged 34 per cent, noted market strategist Charlie Bilello in 2023.
Burry is famous for his apparent prescience, yet his post‑Big Short record shows that all too often, bold calls really don’t age well.
