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.

Lark Davis

Davis covers the full crypto market — not just Bitcoin. His content focuses on identifying altcoin opportunities, understanding new blockchain projects, DeFi protocols, and layer-2 ecosystems.

His strategy is higher risk than Bitcoin-only: he looks for early-stage projects with high upside potential and significant downside risk. He has been transparent about both wins and losses in his portfolio.

He advocates dollar-cost averaging into positions and taking profits during bull markets — lessons he admits he learned the hard way during the 2018 bear market.

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.

Lark Davis

His philosophy is that crypto represents the biggest wealth transfer opportunity of his generation. He believes in holding Bitcoin as a base position and using a portion of the portfolio for higher-risk altcoin exposure.

He has said his biggest financial lesson was not taking profits during the 2017-2018 bull run — a mistake he actively advises his audience to avoid repeating.

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.

Lark Davis

Davis has been public about holding altcoins that went to zero and investing in projects that turned out to be fraudulent or simply failed. He does not hide the losses.

His risk management has evolved directly from those mistakes: he now advocates taking partial profits at every major price milestone, maintaining Bitcoin as a core position, and treating altcoins as a speculative sleeve rather than a primary strategy. The lesson he repeats most often from 2018: not taking profits during euphoria is itself a high-risk decision — most people just don't recognize it as one until prices have already collapsed.

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.

Lark Davis

Lives in Thailand with low overhead costs. Has spoken about the power of geographic arbitrage — earning in dollars and crypto while living somewhere with a lower cost of living.

He exercises consistently, says a healthy body supports a clear financial mind, and advocates for a simple, mobile lifestyle. Does not flaunt luxury publicly.

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.

Lark Davis

Building one of the largest crypto education YouTube channels in the world during the 2020-2021 bull run. His coverage of DeFi and altcoin projects during that period — when those sectors exploded in value — brought him the majority of his audience and income.

His Wealth Mastery community grew substantially during that period.

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.

Lark Davis

In 2021, Davis faced significant controversy when it emerged he had been paid to promote certain crypto projects to his audience without clearly disclosing the payments. He issued an apology and said he had followed what he believed were disclosure norms at the time, but the episode damaged his reputation and became one of the most-cited examples of undisclosed crypto influencer promotions.

He also, like most altcoin-focused analysts, saw his portfolio take brutal losses in the 2022 bear market.

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.

Lark Davis

Lark Davis is a New Zealand-born crypto educator who built his brand primarily on YouTube, starting around 2018. He focuses on cryptocurrency analysis with an emphasis on altcoins, DeFi, and emerging blockchain projects — not just Bitcoin.

His channel "Crypto Lark" grew to over a million subscribers, making him one of the most followed retail crypto educators in the world. He also built a paid subscription community, Wealth Mastery, where he publishes deeper research.

He has lived in Thailand for years, part of a wave of digital nomad crypto educators who operate internationally.

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.

Lark Davis

Crypto Lark YouTube channel (1M+ subscribers). Wealth Mastery (paid research subscription).

Books: "Cryptocurrency Revolution" (authored). Based in Thailand.

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.

Lark Davis

Largely self-taught in crypto and financial markets. No formal finance credentials.