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Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

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Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#221
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graph looks like it's going up to me. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

I'm sure the Fed chart is accurately measuring what it's measuring but when I was a kid in Southern California it was normal to buy a house and raise kids on a single teacher or construction worker salary. That has become nearly impossible over the past couple decades. Many others have seen similar changes in their own areas and I don't think they're being crazy when they say it has gotten much harder to finance a no…

That chart for sure includes higher portion of double income households (because now more women are in the workforce than in the 80s). This reconciles your view with the Fed graph

(Edit-misspelled Fed)

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#222
post #119

Could this just be a collar (sell calls to buy puts)?

If the calls are not covered this is a very bearish position: if the market rises he will lose money on the puts and will have to buy the stock at the higher price (to cover the calls). It is easy to go bankrupt with this position. I would not do this unless I have some type of information that the stock will decline with certainty.

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#223

I'm not sure the bet is as big as it seems from the headline. When you buy options, you pay a fixed premium to get the right to buy/sell a very large value of shares, called the notional. But the notional is not what you are losing if it goes wrong, you lose the premium. The premium can be quite a small number compared to the notional.

They are only selling puts...that's a half-hearted short. They have the resources to borrow shares and bag the whole amount without a time constraint...why not do that?

They’re buying puts.

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one is actively sponsored by their own nation while the other is not. Their tax dollars are being spent for those atrocities. Or is that not something people should quibble about?

Again, thanks for proving my point.

This isn't the kafka trap you think it is because any reasonable reader would see the glaring false equivalence. Supporting atrocities is upsetting and something we have agency over. How do you not see this?

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#225
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fed signaled they are not cutting much further - almost a green light for these kinds of bets.

The fed can take nore active measures than just managing rates. I lost some money by unexpectedly finding myself on the opposite side of US government policy - and dollar-firehose - during COVID. Shorting travel-related stocks can be a losing bet if the government wants to "shore up" share prices by directly injecting hitherto unheard of amounts of liquidity into the market.

At least you got to feel clever when you made that bet against the travel companies :-)

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#226
I envision AI saturating every corner of life—yet its market is ultimately bounded by how much users will actually pay, weighed against the tangible value delivered. The rift arises from overoptimistic guesses about user spending, a chasm that only deepens as open-source models hit that critical "good enough" threshold, and AI data centers devolve into a cutthroat commodity arena, vying on price for off-the-shelf compute power accessible to all—particularly if agile rivals eclipse Nvidia through breakthroughs in efficient/smarter hardware.

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#227
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fed can take nore active measures than just managing rates. I lost some money by unexpectedly finding myself on the opposite side of US government policy - and dollar-firehose - during COVID. Shorting travel-related stocks can be a losing bet if the government wants to "shore up" share prices by directly injecting hitherto unheard of amounts of liquidity into the market.

At least you got to feel clever when you made that bet against the travel companies :-)

I had early "insider" info on COVID admissions from a Pulmonologist spouse, and an understanding of exponential growth (doubling every few days).

I took the initiative to be the first person to WFH in my org, which I did as a pre-emptive quarantine as I was at risk of being infected: several of my spouse's colleagues subsequently got infected. Unfortunately, I didn't link my WFH circumstances that with investing in Zoom.

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA says "bought put options" . One option (either PUT or CALL) is typically 100x the shares (but mini lots of 10x exists or at least did exist at some point). So he bought (he's long on the PUTs) 10 000 PUTs on NVDA and 50 000 PUTs on PLTR. I don't know at which expiration dates nor at which strikes. A PUT option can be either a bet (like in TFA) that an underlying shall go down below a certain price before a certai…

I vouched for your post because the information is correct as far as I can discern. Perhaps others felt that you didn't warn strongly enough against engaging in such "full-on degenerate gambling"? But the risk profile of options depends on more than date to expiration. Of course the strike prices matter, as well as the rest of your portfolio. The real "degenerate gamblers" are taking that leverage without compensatin…

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Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#229
post #221
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the Fed chart is accurately measuring what it's measuring but when I was a kid in Southern California it was normal to buy a house and raise kids on a single teacher or construction worker salary. That has become nearly impossible over the past couple decades. Many others have seen similar changes in their own areas and I don't think they're being crazy when they say it has gotten much harder to finance a no…

That chart for sure includes higher portion of double income households (because now more women are in the workforce than in the 80s). This reconciles your view with the Fed graph (Edit-misspelled Fed)

Households can have more than two incomes - roommates, children who work, grandparents etc.

In practice, household sizes have gone down over time as more people live on their own, which means the income graph is lower than it otherwise would be.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cWvT

As for dual income families, they're mostly a good thing that happens when women can afford to pay for childcare. That is, that book The Two-Income Trap was mostly false. This is part of the topic of Claudia Goldin's economics Nobel, the other part being that the gender wage gap is caused by motherhood interrupting women's careers.

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/goldin-lecture-sl...

Re: Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly overestimates. Alternatives like Truflation show it lower. You may be thinking of Shadowstats, which is run by a crank who just takes the official numbers and adds a number he made up to them. I don't know why cranks always think inflation is secretly higher. Deflation is a lot worse than inflation, so if you're a doomer, believing in deflation would be more effective.

The idea that CPI sucks is far from a conspiracy theory... not sure why you're trying to color it like that. The problem is that the error integrates over time, which IMHO is why graphs like that seem to suggest our standard of living is higher than ever... when a conversation with anyone at a local bus stop will tell you the exact opposite.

It's almost impossible for the standard of living to not be higher than ever. That becomes true if you assign any value at all to new medical discoveries. Like, people have been cured of type 1 diabetes in the last year.

I don't think a guy at a bus stop represents the median household well. I'd rather have https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps.html.

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