Michael Burry is back with a bang.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame posted on X for the first time since April 2023 on Thursday. He shared a still from the movie of actor Christian Bale, who portrayed Burry, staring at a computer screen in disbelief.
“Sometimes, we see bubbles,” he wrote. “Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.”
That’s a reference to the 1983 movie “WarGames,” in which an AI runs thousands of simulations of nuclear exchanges between the US and Soviet Union and discovers they all end in mutual destruction. “A strange game,” the supercomputer says. “The only winning move is not to play.”
Burry’s pinned post suggests he sees unsustainable levels of speculation in markets that he expects to end in devastation, and he’s decided that steering clear of the AI boom, instead of betting on or against it, is the only winning strategy.
Immense buzz over AI has boosted Big Tech stocks such as Nvidia; its shares have surged over 1,200% since the start of 2023, propelling it to an unprecedented $5 trillion market value this week, and helping to catapult the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes to record highs in recent days.
Burry updated his profile name to “Cassandra Unchained,” referring to the priestess in Greek mythology who was cursed to make accurate prophecies but never to be believed. He also changed his bio to read: “One ready to share what I know.”
Echoing his return to the social media platform in November 2021, Burry once again changed his header image to “Satire of Tulip Mania,” a painting by Jan Brueghel the Younger that ridicules the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s.
Burry is best known for predicting and profiting from the collapse of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. His contrarian wager was immortalized in the book and film “The Big Short.”
He’s also famous in financial circles for frequently predicting market crashes and recessions, investing in GameStop long before it became a meme stock, and betting against Elon Musk’s Tesla, Cathie Wood’s flagship Ark fund, Apple, microchip stocks including Nvidia, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 in recent years.
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Notably, in the summer of 2021, he sounded the alarm on the “greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things” and cautioned buyers of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that they were careening toward the “mother of all crashes.”
Burry’s dire warnings caught Musk’s attention in late 2021, when the world’s richest man labeled him a “broken clock.” The Scion Asset Management chief also sent shockwaves through Wall Street in early 2023 with a single-word post: “Sell.”
However, Burry ceased posting to his primary account’s 1.4 million followers shortly afterward.
Burry appeared to grow more optimistic in the second quarter of this year, when his hedge fund swapped bearish put options on six stocks for bullish call options on nine stocks, per its latest portfolio update. The notional values of those positions were $186 million and $522 million, respectively.
At the end of March, Scion held seven positions, including puts on Alibaba, JD.com, and Nvidia, as well as a direct stake in Estée Lauder. Three months later, it held 15 positions, including calls and direct stakes in Estée Lauder and Lululemon, and calls on Alibaba, JD.com, and VF.
“He has gone from a strong conviction bet on a sector fall to a broad-based bet the bull run will continue,” Peter Mallouk, the president and CEO of Creative Planning, told Business Insider in August.
Scion didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
