Michael Burry of 'Big Short' fame says he was 'wrong' to tell investors to 'sell'

By Joseph Adinolfi

Michael Burry, the hedge-fund manager at Scion Asset Management made famous by Michael Lewis's book "the Big Short," said in a Thursday tweet that he was "wrong" to tell investors to sell stocks two months ago.

Burry issued a one-word tweet on Jan. 31 advising his followers to "sell." While he didn't elaborate, MarketWatch's Steve Goldstein noted at the time that it wasn't hard to fill in the blanks.

See: Michael Burry says sell and Jim Cramer says buy. As the Fed meets, here's how they both could be wrong on stocks

The hedge-fund manager, who correctly anticipated the collapse of the U.S. housing market that triggered the 2008 financial crisis, was advising his followers to sell stocks after a stellar January run-up that saw the Nasdaq Composite rise 10.7%, according to FactSet -- its best start to a year in nearly two decades.

On Feb. 2, a few days after Burry's "sell" tweet, the S&P 500 index closed at 4,179.76 after the Fed delivered a 25 basis point interest rate hike. That proved to be the large-cap index's highest close of 2023, as several weeks of declines followed. The index has fallen roughly 3% since that day, according to FactSet data.

But the trend changed once again in March, as U.S. stocks proved surprisingly resilient, shrugging off a transatlantic crisis of confidence in the banking sector, renewed fears of an economic downturn, and expectations that S&P 500 companies suffered their biggest quarterly earnings decline since the second quarter of 2020.

The resilience of U.S. stocks appeared even more remarkable when compared with massive daily swings in Treasury yields that briefly caused implied volatility in the bond market to explode to its highest level since 2008

Wall Street analysts expect corporate earnings for S&P 500 firms to have declined 6.1% during the first quarter, which ends on Friday. If this comes to pass, it would be the biggest quarterly decline since the second quarter of 2020, according to FactSet's John Butters.

Burry sent a second tweet on Thursday sardonically calling out contemporary traders for continuing to "buy the dip" in U.S. stocks, following a Bloomberg News report that 2023 is shaping up to be a banner year for the strategy, which gained prominence during the bull run that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

-Joseph Adinolfi

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03-30-23 1130ET

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