Michael Burry

Burry is a pure fundamental analyst. He reads the actual documents.

Not the analyst summary. Not the ratings agency report.

The actual prospectus, the loan files, the footnotes. For the Big Short trade, he read thousands of individual mortgage loan documents.

Nobody else was doing that. Analysts were looking at aggregate statistics.

The aggregate statistics looked fine. The individual loans were a disaster.

His basic method: find something everyone is ignoring, do the work to understand why it''s mispriced, take a position, and wait. The waiting is the hard part.

He was short the housing market for two years before it collapsed. During those two years his investors were losing money on paper and threatening legal action.

He locked redemptions to prevent forced liquidation. He was right and it cost him two years of misery to prove it.

Farnoosh Torabi

Torabi is a practical, diversified, automation-focused investor. She believes in maxing out tax-advantaged accounts first (401k, Roth IRA), investing in low-cost index funds, and automating everything so investing isn't a decision you make each month.

She's not a stock picker and doesn't pretend to be. Her approach: the market will go up over time, so get in early, stay in, keep costs low, and don't try to time anything.

She's in the Bogle camp philosophically.

What makes her perspective different is her focus on the earning side. Most personal finance advice is about spending less and saving more.

Torabi argues that growing your income — through negotiation, side hustles, career moves — is a more powerful lever than cutting expenses. You can only cut so much.

There's no ceiling on what you can earn.

Michael Burry

Read the documents. That is basically the whole philosophy.

Not the summary. Not the analyst report.

The actual documents. Most investors don''t do this because it''s tedious and slow and it requires a tolerance for complexity that most people don''t want to develop.

His second rule: be willing to be lonely. His housing short was a deeply contrarian position that most finance professionals thought was ridiculous.

He didn''t need their validation. He needed the math to work.

His third: factor in time when sizing a position. The housing market stayed wrong for two years.

Size your position so you can survive being right too early.

Farnoosh Torabi

Torabi's philosophy has three pillars. First: earn more.

She believes income growth is the most underrated financial strategy. Cutting lattes saves you $5 a day.

A salary negotiation can be worth $10,000 a year — compounding forever.

Second: automate and simplify. She doesn't want people thinking about money every day.

Set up the systems — automatic savings, automatic investing, automatic bill pay — and then spend your mental energy on earning more and living well.

Third: talk about money openly. She thinks financial secrecy — between partners, between friends, between parents and kids — is the biggest barrier to financial health.

Her podcast is built on this idea: hearing how real people handle money normalizes the conversation and makes everyone smarter.

Her most resonant principle: financial independence isn't about being rich. It's about having enough that no person, no job, and no situation has power over you.

Michael Burry

He concentrates heavily. When he has a thesis, he puts a large portion of the fund into it.

He also used leverage on the housing trade — borrowing to buy credit default swaps amplified both the wait and the eventual payoff. His risk tolerance is high in the sense that he can hold a losing position for years if the fundamental analysis is intact.

It is low in the sense that he won''t touch anything he doesn''t deeply understand. He doesn''t trade momentum or narratives.

If the math doesn''t work, he''s not interested.

Farnoosh Torabi

Moderate. She believes in taking appropriate risk for your age and goals — more aggressive when young, more conservative as you approach needing the money.

She's not afraid of the stock market but doesn't advocate for concentrated bets or speculative investments.

She stresses the importance of an emergency fund and having "go-to-hell money" — enough cash saved that you can walk away from a bad job, a bad relationship, or a bad situation without financial panic. She frames this as a safety net and a power tool.

Michael Burry

He lives in Saratoga, California. He is notoriously private — he has opened and deleted social media accounts multiple times after his market commentary attracted more attention than he wanted.

He occasionally posts about market risks and then goes quiet for months. He has a son with Asperger''s syndrome, and the experience led him to recognise similar traits in himself and pursue his own autism diagnosis as an adult.

He doesn''t do conferences. He doesn''t do interviews.

He files his quarterly 13F and lets the positions speak.

Farnoosh Torabi

Torabi is thoughtful about spending. She talks about "spending audits" — periodically reviewing every subscription, recurring charge, and discretionary spend to make sure it still aligns with what you actually value.

She and her husband split finances in a way she's been open about: joint accounts for shared expenses (mortgage, kids, household), separate accounts for individual spending. No permission needed for personal purchases under a certain threshold.

She frames this as both financial and relationship advice.

She lives in the New York area with her family. She's not flashy about spending but she's also not a frugality absolutist — she believes in spending on things that bring genuine joy while cutting things that don't.

Michael Burry

The housing trade. In 2005, Burry read thousands of subprime mortgage loan documents and concluded the US housing market was built on loans that would eventually default in large numbers.

He persuaded Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to sell him credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities — essentially insurance that paid out when the mortgages defaulted. The banks thought he was wrong.

They were happy to take his premiums. In 2007–2008 the mortgages defaulted.

His investors made $700 million. Burry personally made about $100 million.

The banks that sold him the swaps needed government bailouts to survive.

Farnoosh Torabi

The So Money podcast is the biggest professional win. Over 1,500 episodes, consistently in the top personal finance charts, and it's given her a platform that reaches millions.

The podcast opened doors to corporate speaking, books, and media opportunities.

"When She Makes More" was a cultural win — it started a national conversation about breadwinner women and money dynamics in relationships. She was on every major talk show discussing it, and it positioned her as someone willing to tackle the uncomfortable money topics that other advisors avoid.

Michael Burry

The trade nearly destroyed him before it paid off. He locked investor redemptions to prevent forced liquidation of his position — probably the right call, but it created a legal and emotional nightmare that he''s described as one of the worst periods of his life.

He also closed Scion to outside investors after winning, which in hindsight was leaving behind an institutional money management career after one of the greatest trades in history. He''s never explained that decision fully.

It may have been the right one. It may not have been.

Farnoosh Torabi

Torabi has been honest about her biggest regret: not negotiating her salary aggressively enough early in her career. As a journalist, she accepted what was offered because she felt grateful to have the job.

She later calculated how much that cost her over a decade of compounding raises and says the number is "depressing."

She uses this story constantly in her teaching — it's her most practical lesson. One conversation about your salary in your 20s can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over a career.

She now coaches women specifically on salary negotiation because she knows the cost of not doing it.

Michael Burry

Michael Burry was born in San Jose, California in 1971. He lost his left eye to retinoblastoma as a child and has worn a prosthetic eye since.

He studied economics at UCLA and then went to Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. During his medical residency at Stanford, he posted detailed stock analysis on investor message boards between midnight and 3 AM.

The quality was consistently good enough that people in finance started paying attention.

He left his residency in 2000 — one year from finishing — to start Scion Capital with $1.1 million in loans from his family. No finance credentials.

Just a public track record and conviction. In his first full year, the S&P 500 fell 11.9%.

Scion returned 55%. From 2001 to 2008, Scion returned over 489% against the S&P 500's 3%.

Then he made the trade.

Farnoosh Torabi

Farnoosh Torabi was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Iranian immigrant parents who came to the US with almost nothing. Her parents worked multiple jobs — her mother cleaned houses, her father worked in tech.

Money was tight but education was non-negotiable. She grew up watching her parents navigate the American financial system without a manual.

She went to Penn State, then got a master's from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She started her career as a financial journalist, writing for Money Magazine, TheStreet.com, and the New York Times.

She covered personal finance from the journalism side — not as an advisor, but as a reporter who could translate complicated money topics into stories people actually wanted to read.

Her first book, "You're So Money," came out in 2008 — right when the financial crisis was making everyone panic about money. The timing was either terrible or perfect depending on how you look at it.

The book was aimed at twenty-somethings trying to be financially savvy without giving up their lives.

Her breakout book was "When She Makes More" in 2014. It tackled the taboo topic of relationships where the woman is the primary breadwinner — the financial, emotional, and relationship dynamics that nobody in personal finance was talking about.

It got massive press attention because it said the quiet part out loud: traditional gender expectations around money are still wrecking relationships, even among progressive couples.

In 2015, she launched the "So Money" podcast. It's now past 1,500 episodes, featuring interviews with everyone from billionaires to regular people sharing their financial wins and disasters.

It consistently ranks in the top personal finance podcasts. The show's strength is range — one episode might feature a CEO, the next a single mom who paid off $100,000 in debt.

Michael Burry

Scion Capital ran from 2000 to 2008. He closed it to outside investors after the Big Short trade — partly because managing money for clients who were screaming at him to reverse a position he knew was right was a genuinely miserable experience, and partly because he didn't need to anymore.

He relaunched as Scion Asset Management, a personal vehicle he still runs today. His current investing is more conventional — value picks, occasional activist positions, portfolio bets that get attention when his 13F filings come out.

He bought GameStop before Reddit did. He shorted Tesla.

He has positioned in water rights and farmland. He tends to be early, which is both his gift and his problem.

Farnoosh Torabi

So Money Media is her primary business — the podcast, newsletter, and associated content. The podcast has featured over 1,500 guests and has a dedicated audience.

She's a contributor to CNET and has written for or appeared on virtually every major financial media outlet — CNBC, CNN, NBC, Forbes, O Magazine, and more. Corporate speaking is a significant revenue stream.

She doesn't manage money or run a fund. Her business model is content, education, and corporate partnerships.

She's done branded content with major financial companies — always disclosed, and she's careful about maintaining editorial independence.

Michael Burry

BA in Economics, UCLA. MD, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, 1999.

He completed three years of his medical residency at Stanford before leaving to start Scion Capital. He is technically a licensed physician who never practiced.

Farnoosh Torabi

Torabi has a bachelor's degree from Penn State and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. The journalism background is her edge — she approaches personal finance as a storyteller and investigator, not as a financial advisor.

She can take complex topics and make them compelling, which is why her podcast works where others don't.