'Big Short' investor Michael Burry says the market has 'jumped the shark' — what he says investors are getting wrong

Michael Burry, the investor who accurately called the U.S. housing crash in 2008, is not feeling good about the state of the stock market these days.

The investor, best known as the inspiration for the 2015 film The Big Short, which looked at his prediction of the subprime mortgage crisis, said he believed the market’s long-running rally is about to end and a significant decline could be on the way.

Must Read

In a post on Substack, Burry said he was having a major feeling of deja vu when it came to the market.

“With what is happening in the market the last week, that I had lived this before suddenly dawned on me,” he wrote (1). “The NASDAQ 100, complete reversal. … I am calling something. The market has jumped the shark.”

Part of the reason for his bearishness is the resemblance, he says, between today’s market and the final parts of the dot-com bubble. Investors, he said, are ignoring economic data and global events and focusing myopically on just one thing instead: AI, in this case.

“Absolutely non-stop AI. Nobody is talking about anything else all day,” Burry wrote after listening to financial radio coverage on a long drive (2).

“Stocks are not up or down because of jobs or consumer sentiment. They are going straight up because they have been going straight up. On a two letter thesis that everyone thinks they understand. … Feeling like the last months of the 1999-2000 bubble.”

The boy who cried wolf

Burry conceded in his post that he has incorrectly forecasted market crashes in the past. He compared Bitcoin to the housing market in March of 2021 (3). Three months later, he warned of a massive bubble and looming market crash that he said would be the worst in history (4).

Neither of those crashes happened and Burry took ownership of that in his post (5), but also pointed to his track record.

“I am now a meme for the number of times I have called a crash,” he wrote. “I have become the boy who cried wolf. History is written not by the victors, but by those that control the pen, and social media has that pen right now, it seems.

“Still, I got it right in 2000, got it right in 2007. Got it right in 2019, helped by COVID, and I called the meme stock crash in mid 2021. I called the bank stock run in 2023.”

Not alone

Burry isn’t the only stock market veteran who is warning of a forthcoming correction.

On May 8, Paul Tudor Jones told CNBC that he felt the current environment on Wall Street felt a lot like 1999, the last strong year before the dot com crash (2). While Jones said he expects the current rally to last another year or two, he worries about how high valuations might rise in that time.

“Just imagine the stock market went up another 40%,” Jones said. “The stock market GDP is going to probably be good lord 300%, 350%. You just know that there’ll be some … breathtaking kind of corrections.”

‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry says the market has ‘jumped the shark’ — what he says investors are getting wrong

Tags: