15 ms·

And Michael Burry has been predicting crashes every few years since the 2008 one. And Bill Ackman predicted 'hell is coming' at the onset of the pandemic and m

And Michael Burry has been predicting crashes every few years since the 2008 one. And Bill Ackman predicted 'hell is coming' at the onset of the pandemic and made $2B [0]. And there were US Senators that also did possibly illegal things to pull money out of the market before the public knew about the pandemic. Outside of disclosures filed with the SEC, stock trading is anonymous yet they will have all sorts of headlines like today on Yahoo Finance it states "Stock futures tumble on heels of grim warning from FedEx". So all players in the market are just selling everything across the market to the tune of -1.4% because FedEx is having issues? I question headlines in the financial sector, more often lately it feels like its just what they want you to believe to get you to take actions that benefit themselves. [0]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/bill-ackman-exits-market-hedges-uses-2-billion-he-made-to-buy-more-stocks-including-hilton.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/bill-ackman-exits-market-hed...

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Yeah, but someday they'll be right.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  Yeah but just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn't mean you will keep looking at that clock
daniel-cussen 4y ago
You shouldn't read those headlines. Both the ones walking you off a cliff in increasingly devious ways the interviews with Warren Buffett saying buy and hold which is a pessimal strategy, and the headlines announcing x happened because y as if you should think y leads x. It did not, they don't know that, news blogs get a pass in telling people false causes after the fact, dude it's purely made up and it's a guessing game to train you to guess as it suits them. Plato's Cave.
- lexapro 4y ago
  Why is buy and hold a "pessimal strategy"?
  - mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
    For example, say you left a company and transferred a 401k balance into Vanguard and put it into VTSAX (total stock market ETF) with no ongoing deposits. Lets say you thought the market was going to go down and on Jan 3rd 2022 you yoinked out your entire balance which for the sake of easy math was exactly $100k (not take a withdrawal, just pull it from the ETF). Today you would still have $100k sitting there in a placeholder account earning $0 (its like a no-mans-land account for moving money in between funds, or if you were prepping an actual withdrawal). If you let that $100k balance stay in VTSAX on Jan 3rd, you would be -19.15% and have $80,850 sitting there today. Granted in this example there aren't regular deposits going in so it really is just money parked there. If you are continually contributing money into a 401k or other tax deferred account, contributing as the market goes down is fine because you're averaging down with the market. Or maybe its not fine depending on your personal circumstances (i.e. going to retire soon or something like that).
    - NegativeK 4y ago
      I've always interpreted Buffet's advice as aimed at time periods way longer than one year.
      - daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Not like he has a fucking Bloomberg terminal with no latency or anything. Like he can't spell out FPGA's but he delegates. Not half as senile as he makes himself look, not a shit mathematician at all, not a folklore-driven dude that anybody can imitate (counterfactual, that's part of the business), publishes information on his colon biopsies for a reason, he is rich because he wants to be rich, he likes money. Plus he's the designated "Richest Man in the World" trading off with Bill Gates like they're a wrestling team. Makes no fucking sense, wealth has been aggregating incredibly for thirty years, rich getting richer, more stratified, more clustered, according to literally everyone even USG census, everyone. But the richest man in the world has had 60 billion dollars on the nose since 2000? What the fuck? Apparently now it's a little higher, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, at like $160 or some billion...like no it's not. Diminished variance stedda amplified variance. Silva Paradox, http://fgemm.com http://fgemm.com. An actual valuation of their wealth would significantly diminish it, and inform others of it, they don't know really. Only a hobo can look in his pocket and say "I have 550 pesos" a rich man it's like either his company has a fluctuating market cap or he needs armies of accountants and lawyers and like occasionally vudu priests literally "Vudunomics" like they believe in magic. Why not? There can be a physics explanation behind it that will not be understood for hundreds of years, if it works hell. Yeah. If it works Hell. White magic or black magic? Well preferably white but when told that requires giving all wealth away to the poor as the first step, they like say...uh...what's the other one? Be richer and richer, always, black magic. OK that works better. And the richest men wrestling team agreed to give half their wealth away, which is OK that's cool in principle, I don't have a read on that. What I can say is white magic simply is hard, you can't successfully give away all your money, you end up with more even more money, and then you give that away and you get it all back, give all all of it away get down to a penny. Apologize to a beggar when you give it to him (it's considered insulting) dude riches leak into your ascetic life, from every nook and cranny, out of nowhere like not quite to the point of finding cash on the sidewalk (who knows, any day now, it's becoming a sick game). Spesh when you have faith, a mustard seed, thing is a mustard seed is a huge amount of neurons, that's a subsection of your brain that needs to germinate from somewhere, very tricky very tricky, and it doesn't work at all half-way. It's all or nothing. Saying more would make it impossible for you to develop it. Matthew 17:20, that's all I got, that's all you need. Whereas if Warren Buffett asks me, I'd say "you're rich." Simple as that, and that's the actual question, it's in practice binary, does he have to worry about money or not? No because he's rich. No, Buffett has no bloomberg terminals, no technology he does understand (he gets for instance stock tickers, gets a ton of things, plays dumb, and some stuff he does in fact not get and is truthful about it, like investing in Apple, he doesn't get that). Yeah bajillion dollars and gets his information for free on yahoo finance like you or me.
mccorrinall 4y ago
And every time Burry shorted the top. Looks like this time he actually hit the long term reversal instead of local high. So, he was always waiting for this and this time he gets green numbers big time.
impulser_ 4y ago
There is a reason why they hedge funds underperform the market. Not by a little, by quite bit. They try too hard to predict the market, when in the long run if they just stayed long they would have done better.
- selectodude 4y ago
  The key word in hedge fund is hedge. They're not supposed to outperform the market. They're supposed to not fall as far as everything else during a crash as well. Granted, that's not really how things work in practice anymore, but that's supposed to be the idea.
- bidirectional 4y ago
  Why is 'the market' the only benchmark worth comparing to? For many investors it is too volatile, they can take worse performance if the chance of major drawdowns is reduced.
coldcode 4y ago
I read a lot of these type of predictions, often you see some people say it's a great time to buy, and others it's a bad time to buy, and generally you will only remember the people who guessed correctly, so none of this helps you today at all. Every time those people who got lucky will appear in some future ad or article making a new prediction, and generally fewer will be lucky twice. In the long run, everyone is likely wrong.
- foobarian 4y ago
  Your comment makes me realize that in the medium term, after most of the unlucky predictors drop off, you are statistically likely to be left with a few really lucky ones (i.e. if a thousand people are tossing coins, you're likely to get one guy with a streak of 10 heads), and these individuals are perfect to put on pedestals as rare and brilliant talents.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    What you do is look at the rationale that was given before it happened. You look at their reasoning and figure out if it was actually what happened in reality. Just make sure you are not picking up on their rationalisation after the fact.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      The fact that they had good reasoning in the past does not guarantee they will continue in the future.
      - twawaaay 4y ago
        You are right, but it is not very useful way of looking at the world. Sometimes you just need to trust people on certain things to be able to make useful decisions having very little or no knowledge in the subject. One useful way of dealing with this is to look at the past performance of the person. Assuming you have no other information about the market, if you see a person having track record of well-reasoned, accurate market predictions it is probably as good signal as it gets that you should trust their predictions. Ideally you would want to check this with other people having knowledge in the topic (and also good track record), check that their knowledge is still applicable to circumstances (if they were able to give good predictions in peace maybe they are not suited to doing this in the time of war) and hopefully also educate yourself just a bit to be able to ask clarifying questions and spot obvious problems.
sb057 4y ago
>So all players in the market are just selling everything across the market to the tune of -1.4% because FedEx is having issues? FedEx's issues is that their volume is down massively. High (nay, accelerating) rates of trade are the foundation of the modern economy. If trade starts to slow down, or, Lord forbid, decline, then yes that can have massive negative repercussions.
- foobarian 4y ago
  Based on the last few years of my (and a relatively wide friend circle) experiences with FedEx I wouldn't be surprised if they are just suffering from getting outcompeted by Amazon and others. If their internal logistics are as bad as what the customer-facing experience would lead me to believe, I worry for their future. Edit: completely subjective and armchair-quarterback-like opinion, of course.
  - prottog 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I always have issues with UPS and never with FedEx. It could very well be a local thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nostromo 4y ago
  > down massively 23.52B Expected Revenue 23.20B Reported Reported Difference: ~1%
mmastrac 4y ago
As the old joke goes: Burry predicted 20 of the last two crashes.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  Burry is doing a lot of pretty short term speculation, according to his filings. What is a crash for a short term investor might be a bump for a long term one.
melling 4y ago
How about the Biggest Bear of them all. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-bubble-yet-burst-jeremy-151537224.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-bubble-yet-burst-jeremy...
fullshark 4y ago
My knee jerk reaction was yours, but he does flesh out his argument in the piece, and it makes sense...
bidirectional 4y ago
Ackman said hell was coming, was appropriately hedged using instruments which would appreciate when hell did indeed come, and made $2bn on his hedge which offset the losses in his equity positions. He didn't net profit $2bn.
- llampx 4y ago
  He appeared on TV crying while his firm was unrolling their hedges and buying stock for the rebound. Never trust media.
  - dkrich 4y ago
    Ackman has a very mixed track record and has not had particularly great returns. To believe that he somehow predicted the entire sequence of events is being incredibly generous. Earlier this year he laid out an unbelievably lazy bull case for Netflix when it was around $350/share and said he had accumulated over a billion dollar position only to sell it a month later a massive loss saying the story had changed.
    - fullshark 4y ago
      It's not that he tried to predict, it's that he tried to cause a panic selloff to buy stocks for cheaper. I imagine his CNBC interview had some effect it was unhinged and went semi viral.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    its called "talking your book"
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    This is the first time it's occurred to me that any "market-expert" who is widely listened too has an inherent conflict of interest. By misleading the public they can increase their own gains.
    - llampx 4y ago
spaceman_2020 4y ago
> And there were US Senators that also did possibly illegal things to pull money out of the market before the public knew about the pandemic I just found out that there's a new ETF being filed that tracks trades by democrats and republicans. Probably beat the market easily
- Aaronstotle 4y ago
  What's the name for it?
- gumby 4y ago
  Does one group do better than the other?
- triceratops 4y ago
  They disclose their trades a month or two afterward. If there's any confidential info embedded in those trades its value is probably gone by the time we find out about them.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
The only thing better than seeking alpha is creating alpha.
behaveEc0n00 4y ago
Chomsky has been calling out their effort to get you to take actions that benefit “them” for decades: https://youtu.be/N11tcnPBwf4 https://youtu.be/N11tcnPBwf4 Jim Cramer said the quiet bits out loud: https://youtu.be/gyaPf6qXLa8 https://youtu.be/gyaPf6qXLa8 https://youtu.be/r07Gg92YjOI https://youtu.be/r07Gg92YjOI US military industrial complex donated propaganda research to unis after Korea and it made its way to journalism, behavioral economics, advertising, and marketing programs. “Stimulate as best as possible an emotional mood, insert talking point so next time that mood bubbles up the message comes to mind.”

JKCalhoun 4y ago

Yeah, but someday they'll be right.

danjoredd 4y ago
Yeah but just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn't mean you will keep looking at that clock

daniel-cussen 4y ago

You shouldn't read those headlines. Both the ones walking you off a cliff in increasingly devious ways the interviews with Warren Buffett saying buy and hold which is a pessimal strategy, and the headlines announcing x happened because y as if you should think y leads x. It did not, they don't know that, news blogs get a pass in telling people false causes after the fact, dude it's purely made up and it's a guessing game to train you to guess as it suits them. Plato's Cave.

lexapro 4y ago
Why is buy and hold a "pessimal strategy"?
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  For example, say you left a company and transferred a 401k balance into Vanguard and put it into VTSAX (total stock market ETF) with no ongoing deposits. Lets say you thought the market was going to go down and on Jan 3rd 2022 you yoinked out your entire balance which for the sake of easy math was exactly $100k (not take a withdrawal, just pull it from the ETF). Today you would still have $100k sitting there in a placeholder account earning $0 (its like a no-mans-land account for moving money in between funds, or if you were prepping an actual withdrawal). If you let that $100k balance stay in VTSAX on Jan 3rd, you would be -19.15% and have $80,850 sitting there today. Granted in this example there aren't regular deposits going in so it really is just money parked there. If you are continually contributing money into a 401k or other tax deferred account, contributing as the market goes down is fine because you're averaging down with the market. Or maybe its not fine depending on your personal circumstances (i.e. going to retire soon or something like that).
  - NegativeK 4y ago
    I've always interpreted Buffet's advice as aimed at time periods way longer than one year.
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      Not like he has a fucking Bloomberg terminal with no latency or anything. Like he can't spell out FPGA's but he delegates. Not half as senile as he makes himself look, not a shit mathematician at all, not a folklore-driven dude that anybody can imitate (counterfactual, that's part of the business), publishes information on his colon biopsies for a reason, he is rich because he wants to be rich, he likes money. Plus he's the designated "Richest Man in the World" trading off with Bill Gates like they're a wrestling team. Makes no fucking sense, wealth has been aggregating incredibly for thirty years, rich getting richer, more stratified, more clustered, according to literally everyone even USG census, everyone. But the richest man in the world has had 60 billion dollars on the nose since 2000? What the fuck? Apparently now it's a little higher, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, at like $160 or some billion...like no it's not. Diminished variance stedda amplified variance. Silva Paradox, http://fgemm.com http://fgemm.com. An actual valuation of their wealth would significantly diminish it, and inform others of it, they don't know really. Only a hobo can look in his pocket and say "I have 550 pesos" a rich man it's like either his company has a fluctuating market cap or he needs armies of accountants and lawyers and like occasionally vudu priests literally "Vudunomics" like they believe in magic. Why not? There can be a physics explanation behind it that will not be understood for hundreds of years, if it works hell. Yeah. If it works Hell. White magic or black magic? Well preferably white but when told that requires giving all wealth away to the poor as the first step, they like say...uh...what's the other one? Be richer and richer, always, black magic. OK that works better. And the richest men wrestling team agreed to give half their wealth away, which is OK that's cool in principle, I don't have a read on that. What I can say is white magic simply is hard, you can't successfully give away all your money, you end up with more even more money, and then you give that away and you get it all back, give all all of it away get down to a penny. Apologize to a beggar when you give it to him (it's considered insulting) dude riches leak into your ascetic life, from every nook and cranny, out of nowhere like not quite to the point of finding cash on the sidewalk (who knows, any day now, it's becoming a sick game). Spesh when you have faith, a mustard seed, thing is a mustard seed is a huge amount of neurons, that's a subsection of your brain that needs to germinate from somewhere, very tricky very tricky, and it doesn't work at all half-way. It's all or nothing. Saying more would make it impossible for you to develop it. Matthew 17:20, that's all I got, that's all you need. Whereas if Warren Buffett asks me, I'd say "you're rich." Simple as that, and that's the actual question, it's in practice binary, does he have to worry about money or not? No because he's rich. No, Buffett has no bloomberg terminals, no technology he does understand (he gets for instance stock tickers, gets a ton of things, plays dumb, and some stuff he does in fact not get and is truthful about it, like investing in Apple, he doesn't get that). Yeah bajillion dollars and gets his information for free on yahoo finance like you or me.

mccorrinall 4y ago

And every time Burry shorted the top. Looks like this time he actually hit the long term reversal instead of local high. So, he was always waiting for this and this time he gets green numbers big time.

impulser_ 4y ago

There is a reason why they hedge funds underperform the market. Not by a little, by quite bit. They try too hard to predict the market, when in the long run if they just stayed long they would have done better.

selectodude 4y ago
The key word in hedge fund is hedge. They're not supposed to outperform the market. They're supposed to not fall as far as everything else during a crash as well. Granted, that's not really how things work in practice anymore, but that's supposed to be the idea.
bidirectional 4y ago
Why is 'the market' the only benchmark worth comparing to? For many investors it is too volatile, they can take worse performance if the chance of major drawdowns is reduced.

coldcode 4y ago

I read a lot of these type of predictions, often you see some people say it's a great time to buy, and others it's a bad time to buy, and generally you will only remember the people who guessed correctly, so none of this helps you today at all. Every time those people who got lucky will appear in some future ad or article making a new prediction, and generally fewer will be lucky twice. In the long run, everyone is likely wrong.

foobarian 4y ago
Your comment makes me realize that in the medium term, after most of the unlucky predictors drop off, you are statistically likely to be left with a few really lucky ones (i.e. if a thousand people are tossing coins, you're likely to get one guy with a streak of 10 heads), and these individuals are perfect to put on pedestals as rare and brilliant talents.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- twawaaay 4y ago
  What you do is look at the rationale that was given before it happened. You look at their reasoning and figure out if it was actually what happened in reality. Just make sure you are not picking up on their rationalisation after the fact.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    The fact that they had good reasoning in the past does not guarantee they will continue in the future.
    - twawaaay 4y ago
      You are right, but it is not very useful way of looking at the world. Sometimes you just need to trust people on certain things to be able to make useful decisions having very little or no knowledge in the subject. One useful way of dealing with this is to look at the past performance of the person. Assuming you have no other information about the market, if you see a person having track record of well-reasoned, accurate market predictions it is probably as good signal as it gets that you should trust their predictions. Ideally you would want to check this with other people having knowledge in the topic (and also good track record), check that their knowledge is still applicable to circumstances (if they were able to give good predictions in peace maybe they are not suited to doing this in the time of war) and hopefully also educate yourself just a bit to be able to ask clarifying questions and spot obvious problems.

sb057 4y ago

>So all players in the market are just selling everything across the market to the tune of -1.4% because FedEx is having issues? FedEx's issues is that their volume is down massively. High (nay, accelerating) rates of trade are the foundation of the modern economy. If trade starts to slow down, or, Lord forbid, decline, then yes that can have massive negative repercussions.

foobarian 4y ago
Based on the last few years of my (and a relatively wide friend circle) experiences with FedEx I wouldn't be surprised if they are just suffering from getting outcompeted by Amazon and others. If their internal logistics are as bad as what the customer-facing experience would lead me to believe, I worry for their future. Edit: completely subjective and armchair-quarterback-like opinion, of course.
- prottog 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I always have issues with UPS and never with FedEx. It could very well be a local thing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nostromo 4y ago
> down massively 23.52B Expected Revenue 23.20B Reported Reported Difference: ~1%

mmastrac 4y ago

As the old joke goes: Burry predicted 20 of the last two crashes.

twawaaay 4y ago
Burry is doing a lot of pretty short term speculation, according to his filings. What is a crash for a short term investor might be a bump for a long term one.

melling 4y ago

How about the Biggest Bear of them all. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-bubble-yet-burst-jeremy-151537224.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-bubble-yet-burst-jeremy...

fullshark 4y ago

My knee jerk reaction was yours, but he does flesh out his argument in the piece, and it makes sense...

bidirectional 4y ago

Ackman said hell was coming, was appropriately hedged using instruments which would appreciate when hell did indeed come, and made $2bn on his hedge which offset the losses in his equity positions. He didn't net profit $2bn.

llampx 4y ago
He appeared on TV crying while his firm was unrolling their hedges and buying stock for the rebound. Never trust media.
- dkrich 4y ago
  Ackman has a very mixed track record and has not had particularly great returns. To believe that he somehow predicted the entire sequence of events is being incredibly generous. Earlier this year he laid out an unbelievably lazy bull case for Netflix when it was around $350/share and said he had accumulated over a billion dollar position only to sell it a month later a massive loss saying the story had changed.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    It's not that he tried to predict, it's that he tried to cause a panic selloff to buy stocks for cheaper. I imagine his CNBC interview had some effect it was unhinged and went semi viral.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  its called "talking your book"
- Buttons840 4y ago
  This is the first time it's occurred to me that any "market-expert" who is widely listened too has an inherent conflict of interest. By misleading the public they can increase their own gains.
  - llampx 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

> And there were US Senators that also did possibly illegal things to pull money out of the market before the public knew about the pandemic I just found out that there's a new ETF being filed that tracks trades by democrats and republicans. Probably beat the market easily

Aaronstotle 4y ago
What's the name for it?
gumby 4y ago
Does one group do better than the other?
triceratops 4y ago
They disclose their trades a month or two afterward. If there's any confidential info embedded in those trades its value is probably gone by the time we find out about them.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

The only thing better than seeking alpha is creating alpha.

behaveEc0n00 4y ago

Chomsky has been calling out their effort to get you to take actions that benefit “them” for decades: https://youtu.be/N11tcnPBwf4 https://youtu.be/N11tcnPBwf4 Jim Cramer said the quiet bits out loud: https://youtu.be/gyaPf6qXLa8 https://youtu.be/gyaPf6qXLa8 https://youtu.be/r07Gg92YjOI https://youtu.be/r07Gg92YjOI US military industrial complex donated propaganda research to unis after Korea and it made its way to journalism, behavioral economics, advertising, and marketing programs. “Stimulate as best as possible an emotional mood, insert talking point so next time that mood bubbles up the message comes to mind.”