Michael Burley has been surprisingly quiet for most of 2023, which some have speculated was due to a number of pessimistic market predictions that never came true. It is said that this ultimately taught him to keep his mouth shut.
The founder of Scion Asset Management, who predicted the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and short-selling in the housing market and who played Christian Bale in The Big Short, said that by April last year, It had been actively bearish for several months.
He predicted “the root of every crash” in the stock market in September 2022, saying the carnage could be “worse than 2008.”
Elsewhere, Elon Musk declared that he “should” short Tesla stock.
In November, Berry cryptically said the market “has no idea how short I am.”
When the Silicon Valley banking crisis erupted last spring, Barry tweeted, “We may have found our Enron today.”
But weeks later, in late March, Berry admitted he was “wrong” to issue an ominous one-word warning to investors two months ago urging them to “sell.”
At the time, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index was in a bull market.
“There was no BTFD generation like you,” Barry added in a seemingly caustic follow-up tweet. The acronym BTFD stands for “Buy the f—king dip.”
Since then, Burley has remained surprisingly quiet, deleting all posts and going dark with X. Still, an August securities filing revealed that Burley hedged $886.6 million in bets against the S&P 500 index by purchasing bearish options on the index. Ta.
Specifically, Barry bought puts (financial products that bet on a decline in stock prices) on ETFs that track both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq. It's unclear whether he held these puts through the end of the year, but he held them for at least six months starting in April, according to the filing.
The S&P ended 2023 up 24% and the Nasdaq up 43%.
Elsewhere, Berry bet on BlackRock's iShares Semiconductor ETF in the middle of last year. The ETF includes stocks such as Nvidia and Intel, which have posted big gains over the last year. The index rose 50% and hit a record high by the end of the year.
Filings for the fourth quarter of this year have not yet been released, but some investors have speculated that Berry's silence in recent months may indicate his numbers aren't as good. .
“Once they do the right thing, they won't shut up after that,” said one investor. “Maybe he'll finally hang up after this year's fiasco.”
It wasn't all bad for Berry. Although he seemed unusually optimistic, he bought up troubled local bank stocks during the crisis and sold them for a sizable profit, according to his filings.
As for Tesla, Berry revealed that he was shorting the stock when it was around $240 per share.
By year's end, the stock had soared to more than $380 per share.
“The streets are littered with people who have tried and failed to short Tesla,” another source said.
Scion Asset Management did not respond to a request for comment.
