There’s a good article on blogger turned super-investor Michael Burry from the always excellent Michael Lewis in this month’s Vanity Fair.
While most of the article is about how Burry found a way to bet against the subprime market, the pen portrait is at least as fascinating:
Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied. Indeed, the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
“If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are,” Burry said. “At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules.…
I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it’d be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true.”
Michael Burry seems to be another of those high functioning almost autistic value investors like Buffett and perhaps even Benjamin Graham.
There’s hope for all us weirdos!
(Source: Vanity Fair article on Michael Burry)
