Jess Battison
The Big Short investor Michael Burry has bet $1.6 billion on a stock market crash – appearing to suggest a major downfall.
Burry, 52, is well-known for making an absolute fortune when he predicted the collapse of the US housing market back in 2008.
The events of his massive profits from the crisis between 2007 and 2010 inspired the comedy-drama The Big Short, which starred Christian Bale as Burry alongside the likes of Margot Robbie, Steve Carell and Brad Pitt.
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And now, it looks like Burry is suggesting that two major stock markets are going to plummet in value.
According to Security Exchange Commission filings released earlier this week, the American investor has made bearish bets against the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.
Burry’s fund, Scion Asset Management, bought $866 million in put options (this is the right to sell an asset at a particular price) against a fund tracking the S&P 500 and then $739 million against the Nasdaq 100 fund.
So basically, these filings are suggesting the money-man is using more than 90 percent of his portfolio to bet that the markets are going to totally tumble.
If the stock does decline, Burry can make big money from his ‘bets’ – just like he did with the big 2008 crash.
Burry’s bets against the US housing market plummeted him up into fame as everything else fell, but he’s not always been totally right.
He seems to have been a little wavering with his stock picks this year. Like back in January, he tweeted a cryptic messages to his followers on X (back when it was still Twitter).
He simply wrote ‘sell’ but by the end of March, he backtracked and wrote: “I was wrong to say sell.”
Burry actually left the social platform not long after that cryptic tweet to his 1.3 million followers, deleting his account.
It came as market-investors awaited the Federal Reserve rate decision but it wasn’t very clear what he was on about.
And the investor had deleted his account in times before.
In November 2022, he shut it down after a spat with Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk.
Over a series of posts, Burry attempted to call out Musk over his business dealings, prompting the CEO to brand him a ‘broken clock’ in his own post.
And back in June 2021, Burry deleted his Twitter account after warning of the ‘Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in All Things’ in a tweet.
He’d been warning against investing in cryptocurrencies, in another of his plunge predictions.