Burry Quotes & Sayings

The more you want to dig a hole and burry yourself in it, the more you need to run and be ALIVE and do things. The more you want to do nothing, the more you need to do something. The more you want to be selfish, just think about yourself and your own pain, the more you need to look outward and try to cheer other people up. Then you will find happiness for yourself, when you give yourself away in any way you can. — Lisa Bedrick

I think a lot of funds get their ideas from Wall Street. I just like to find my own ideas. I read a lot. A lot of news. I just follow my nose. A lot of times it's a dead end, but sometimes there's value there. — Michael Burry

I didn't offer transparency. I provided one quarterly report in letter form. That was all you got. I basically demanded that if you're going to invest in my fund you need to accept my terms. The terms not being super highs, but just, I'm not going to cater to you. — Michael Burry

Even though life is hard, never make your life miserable, stressed and out weighed, you will burry yourself in stress. — Auliq Ice

However, if one has been playing the buy-and-hold game with quality securities, one has been exposed to a substantial amount of market risk because the valuations placed on these securities have implied overly rosy scenarios prone to popular revision in times of more realistic expectation. This is one of those times, but it is my feeling that the revisions have not been severe enough, the expectations not yet realistic enough. Hence, the world's best companies largely remain overpriced in the marketplace. — Michael Burry

There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry's purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars' worth of bonds. He'd either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he'd insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn't own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to "insure" it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn't insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market - and this was the second way to think about it. — Michael Lewis

Vasudeva listened with great attention. Listening carefully, he let
everything enter his mind, birthplace and childhood, all that learning,
all that searching, all joy, all distress. This was among the
ferryman's virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how
to listen. Without him having spoken a word, the speaker sensed how
Vasudeva let his words enter his mind, quiet, open, waiting, how he
did not lose a single one, awaited not a single one with impatience,
did not add his praise or rebuke, was just listening. Siddhartha felt,
what a happy fortune it is, to confess to such a listener, to burry in
his heart his own life, his own search, his own suffering. — Hermann Hesse

I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind. — Michael Burry

In early October 2008, after the U.S. government had stepped in to say it would, in effect, absorb all the losses in the financial system and prevent any big Wall Street firm from failing, Burry had started to buy stocks with enthusiasm, for the first time in years. — Michael Lewis

That was a time when a man had the right to be burried by his own son an' a son had the right to burry his own father. — John Steinbeck

I just really like to find my own ideas. — Michael Burry

My positioning with my investors was always, I need three to five years. — Michael Burry

Read every line item until you get it. — Michael Burry

My natural state is an outsider. I've always felt outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group. — Michael Burry

Sometimes markets err big time. Markets erred when they gave America Online the currency to buy Time Warner. They erred when they bet against George Soros and for the British pound. And they are erring right now by continuing to float along as if the most significant credit bubble history has ever seen does not exist. Opportunities are rare, and large opportunities on which one can put nearly unlimited capital to work at tremendous potential returns are even more rare. Selectively shorting the most problematic mortgage-backed securities in history today amounts to just such an opportunity. — Michael Burry

Humans are capable of so much more. Power mongers like you have stripped away what is most valuable to us, the importance of our heritage and family values. We have been robbed of this, blinded by your authority, while you encourage us to burry ourselves in debt and rely on our corrupt governments. Men and women around the world have been forced to work long hours to keep up with inflated debts, all the while abandoning the families they struggle to support. History repeats, and repeats. It's time to break the cycle and start anew. — Aaron B. Powell

If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are. — Michael Burry

Friends, romans, countrymen lend me your ears i want to burry ceasar but not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them the good is often entered their their bones if it were so then let it be with ceasar. — Gaius Iulius Caesar

The borrowers will always be willing to take a great deal for themselves. It's up to the lenders to show restraint, and when they lose it, watch out. — Michael Burry

Everything I do in investment is just very different. — Michael Burry

When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn't ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn't know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. — Michael Lewis

Early on, people invested in me because of my letters and then, somehow, after they invested, they stopped reading them. — Michael Burry

Goldman Sachs itself - and so Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them. Secondly, there was a crude, messy, slow, but acceptable substitute for Mike Burry's credit default swaps: the actual cash bonds. According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn't risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman's books, they'd be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things, — Michael Lewis

Forget the pat, let the dead burry the dead. — Robert Bloch

Hide the scars, let us pretend. If you burry deep enough, no one can find them. — S.L. Northey

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created — Michael Lewis

The deeper he got into his medical career, the more Burry felt constrained by his problems with other people in the flesh. He briefly tried to hide in pathology, where the people had the decency to be dead, but that didn't work. — Michael Lewis

The late 90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane. — Michael Burry

When I stand on my special-issue "Intelligent Investor" ladder and peer out over the frenzied crowd, I see very few others doing the same. Many stocks remain overvalued, and speculative excess - both on the upside and on the downside - is embedded in the frenzy around stocks of all stripes. And yes, I am talking about March 2001, not March 2000. — Michael Burry

In essence, the stock market represents three separate categories of business. They are, adjusted for inflation, those with shrinking intrinsic value, those with approximately stable intrinsic value, and those with steadily growing intrinsic value. The preference, always, would be to buy a long-term franchise at a substantial discount from growing intrinsic value. — Michael Burry