Michael Burrythe investor known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis shared insights on why mastering an industry isn’t necessary to succeed in investing.
Michael Burry’s early engineering journey
On Thursday, to XBurry recalled that in 1982-83 he worked with a friend who would later work at Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT)created a stock market game using a semi-random number generator on his friend’s new family IBM (NYSE:IBM) PC.
“We printed stock certificates and sold them to friends. He and I co-founded the Computer Science club at Santa Teresa High in 1987,” he wrote.
Burry also learned Pascal, APL and HTML. He later worked at IBM research facilities in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where he described debugging as “horrific” in the terminal-based, pre-WYSIWYG environment.
WYSIWYG, short for ‘What You See Is What You Get’, is a type of editor where the content looks the same when edited as it does when it is published. It allows people to add text, images, and markup layouts visually, without having to write code, making it easy for non-coders to create documents or web pages.
Burry also revealed that his first coding assistant was an HTML editor called HoT MetaL, which he used around 1995.
He also noted that he worked near Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley during the 1998-2000 dot-com boom. “Even though I studied medicine.”
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You don’t need ties to Silicon Valley to invest successfully: Burry
Burry noted that growing up and raising his children in Silicon Valley meant being surrounded by semiconductor industry executives and successful startup founders.
However, he said he ultimately took different paths, hasn’t coded in 30 years and never studied accounting.
“None of this really means anything. To be a good investor in a sector, you don’t need to have worked in the sector. It just requires work (and a lot of reading),” he wrote.
How reading Buffett’s biography shaped Burry’s investing
In response to a question about his favorite must-read book, Burry quoted “Buffett: Making of an American Capitalist” by Roger Lowenstein.
When asked if he is considering it Warren Buffett Burry, the greatest investor of our time, reflected on Lowenstein’s 1995 biography and said that Buffett “was a force of nature.”
He added that reading the book helped him understand the level of skill required to achieve greatness like Buffett – although he admitted that this was a standard he could never fully achieve but could only strive for.
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Michael Burry: net worth, career and bet on the housing market in 2008
Burry currently has a net worth of $200 million, according to to Celebrity Net Worth. He is widely credited with predicting and profiting from the 2008 housing market collapse.
His story was recorded in Michael Lewis’s book “The Big Short” and later adapted into the Oscar-winning film of the same name, which starred Burry Christian Bale.
Originally trained as a physician, Burry founded Scion Capitala hedge fund, in 2000. Its strategy focused on identifying undervalued stocks and shorting overhyped assets, which delivered strong returns in the early 2000s, even during the dot-com crash.
Today, he has caused significant ripples following his allegations of the same Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) could use accounting tricks to inflate its market value.
Benzinga Edge Rankings puts Nvidia in the 97th percentile for growth. Click here to see how it performs in other metrics compared to companies like AMD and INTC.
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