Michael Burry is a physician, hedge fund manager, and investor from the United States. He founded and ran the hedge fund Scion Capital from 2000 to 2008, before closing it to focus on his personal investments. He is best known for being one of the first investors to predict and profit from the 2007-2010 subprime mortgage crisis. He made a personal profit of $100 million and $700 million for his investors by shorting the 2007 mortgage bond market using collateralized debt obligations (CDO).
Burry was played by Christian Bale in the 2015 film The Big Short, which portrayed some of the key players in the subprime mortgage crisis in a fictionalized version.
Michael Burry Wiki/Bio:
| Real Name: | Michael James Burry |
| Nick Name: | Michael Burry |
| Date of Birth: | 19 June 1971 |
| Zodiac Sign: | Gemini |
| Birthplace: | San Jose, California, U.S. |
| Nationality: | American |
| Profession: | Physician, investor, and hedge fund manager |
| Marital Status: | Married |
Michael Burry Education:
Michael Burry completed his school at Santa Teresa High School. He studied economics and pre-med at the University of California, Los Angeles, received an MD from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and began but did not complete his pathology residency at Stanford University Medical Center.
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Michael Burry Investment Career:
Burry worked as a neurology resident at Stanford Hospital after medical school, then as a pathology resident at Stanford Hospital.
He then went on to found his own hedge fund. He had already established a reputation as an investor through his success in value investing, which he discussed on message boards on the stock discussion site Silicon Investor beginning in 1996. He was so successful with his stock picks that he drew the attention of Vanguard, White Mountains Insurance Group, and prominent investors like Joel Greenblatt.
Burry founded Scion Capital with inheritance and loans from his family after closing down his website in November 2000. He named it after one of his favorite novels, Terry Brooks’ The Scions of Shannara (1990). He quickly generated huge profits for his investors.
Burry began focusing on the subprime market in 2005. He correctly predicted the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2007 based on his analysis of mortgage lending practices in 2003 and 2004. Between November 1, 2000, and June 2008, Scion Capital generated returns of 489.34% (net of fees and expenses). According to his website, Burry liquidated his credit default swap short positions by April 2008 and did not benefit from the 2008 and 2009 bailouts. He later liquidated his company to concentrate on his personal investments.
Burry reopened his hedge fund, this time under the name Scion Asset Management, in 2013, filing reports as an exempt reporting adviser (ERA) registered in California and approved by the SEC. He has spent a lot of time and money investing in water, gold, and farmland.
Bloomberg News quoted an email from Burry in August 2019 in which he stated that there was a bubble in large US company stocks due to the popularity of passive investing. Alphabet Inc. and Facebook were the fund’s largest investments in 2020.
According to a now-deleted tweet, Burry began shorting Tesla before or around early December 2020 and likely increased his short positions after Tesla’s market cap surpassed that of Facebook.
It was reported in May 2021 that he held puts on over 800,000 Tesla shares. After a 100% increase in Tesla’s stock value in October 2021, he announced that he was no longer shorting it.
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Michael Burry Personal Life:
Burry was raised in San Jose, California. He has Rusyn ancestry. He lost his left eye to retinoblastoma when he was two years old and has worn a prosthetic eye ever since.
Burry is a married man with children who lived in Saratoga, California.