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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

#321
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of thing happens with investors... they work their butt off for years, do well, then think it's them rather than the work.

That's sort of Taleb's whole thing: most successful investors just happened to be riding a wave and cannot claim any sort of genius. The Black Swan event is always explained away as some kind of environmental blip and investment success explained as the inevitable outcome of hard work- when in fact it is Black Swans that are inevitable and hard-working investors are just a background constant.

While what you are saying is almost certainly true, I'm actually talking about something else - people who did good work and then stop doing good work in fields where good work = good decisions. It's easy to stop doing the work and keep making the decisions and no one is the wiser for years.

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

#322

It might become the modern Tulip Mania of our time.

Tulips didn't largely replace the most popular search engine. They didn't replace employees. Tulips were a meme stock, AI is a breakthrough.

Could be overvalued, but it is not vaporware.

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

#323

Article is misleading/wrong on the sizing: > Scion bought roughly $187.6 million in puts on Nvidia and $912 million in puts on Palantir, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. But 13F reports the market value of the underlying shares for options, not the premium paid for the options All we know is at time of filing he has 10k NVDA puts and 50k PLTR puts. We don't know the strike price or the duratio…

I can find extreme Nvidia puts on robinhood for 2 cents right now. So risking ~$2 of actual money gets you ~$20,000 notional 13F value.

So the claim "$187.6 million in puts on Nvidia" potentially means "Burry risked a total of $18,760 betting against Nvidia" in reality.

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

#324
post #294

Article is misleading/wrong on the sizing: > Scion bought roughly $187.6 million in puts on Nvidia and $912 million in puts on Palantir, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. But 13F reports the market value of the underlying shares for options, not the premium paid for the options All we know is at time of filing he has 10k NVDA puts and 50k PLTR puts. We don't know the strike price or the duratio…

Personally I find the reporting of underlying value more useful than the price paid in puts, since it reflects the asset itself rather than an arbitrary price for an option that could be any of many different strikes or expirations. The option price itself is not that meaningful.

>The option price itself is not that meaningful.

It is the most meaningful thing. It's the exact amount of money you are risking. It's the exact amount you lose if it doesn't strike. If I buy a put for $2, the most I can lose is $2. It's meaningful even with no other information.

13F notional value, on the other hand, is meaningless without more info.

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

#325
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I find the reporting of underlying value more useful than the price paid in puts How so? If I buy TSLA puts at a $10 strike or a $500 strike they show up the exact same on the 13F as both have to be reported as if they are delta 1 when showing a share count. One is a very meaningful bet and one is throwing money away.

That’s exactly correct, which is why I find the actual option price not so relevant. Presumably that’s why it’s also reported in the way that it is.

I find this comment non-sequitur. We may have a mismatched understanding of how options work.

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

#326
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way he gets margin called, these surely are puts, not pure stock shorting. This isn't some random guy.

Investors can & do make mistakes. “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” ― John Maynard Keynes

Speaking of mistakes, that quote is from A. Gary Schilling rather than Keynes.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

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

#327
I could see the case for Palantir purely from the ridiculous P/E ratio. On the other hand hey, so does Tesla and it's stayed irrational longer than many shorters have stayed solvent.

But Nvidia seems highly risky to bet against. Also a very high P/E ratio, but not too crazy. And the demand is extremely real and keeps growing.

Until the latest earnings, all the hyperscalers were basically telling us quarter after quarter that they were capacity constrained and backlogged largely due to AI workloads. And capacity generally translated to GPUs. Only now has MSFT reported being constrained on power, which might signal a shift.

But that doesn't mean lower demand, it just means folks lower down the totem pole can finally get their hands on GPUs. Large sovereign nations, including US and China, are jockeying over these things.

Even if this bubble pops, I still don't see demand going down. If you look honestly for indicators, there is tons of data showing rocketing usage which is translating into real productivity wins. In a capitalistic world, that dependency is going to be impossible to wean off of.

I also don't see any real competition on the horizon yet. I kinda understand NVDA's moat is more than just their chips, it's also the ecosystem. I don't claim to deeply understand this (as another comment points out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826309), but there are other signs I see:

1. Huawei was forced to train their models on non-Nvidia hardware, and they couldn't get a single training run completed, AIUI due to showstopping bugs and other issues in the stack.

2. Anecdotally I hear AWS has been unsuccessfully trying to get customers to use Trainium. They all prefer Nvidia.

3. Google announced OpenAI would use TPUs on GCP and now is leasing Nvidia capacity from Coreweave to support the deal.

With everyone locked in a Red Queen's race to train the most powerful models ASAP, they can't afford any delays inevitably introduced by new platforms.

The real threat right now is that behind all the smiling partnership announcements, everyone is trying desperately to diversify away from this monopsony. They will eventually succeed, but doesn't seem it will happen anytime soon.

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

#328

It might become the modern Tulip Mania of our time.

Tulips didn't largely replace the most popular search engine. They didn't replace employees. Tulips were a meme stock, AI is a breakthrough. Could be overvalued, but it is not vaporware.

Tulips almost can replace employees, just like AI

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

#329
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This game is far from over and I find your prediction almost naive.

People have been talking about competing and trying to compete with the nvidia GPU/Cuda stack for almost 20 years (since the start). There have been various efforts. They have all fallen flat. Nvidia isn't standing still, the target keeps moving forward. To suggest Nvidia will have the game to themselves for another 10 years might turn out to be wrong, but it isn't naive. You are the naive one here.

There hasn't really been any significant money in competing with cuda however. Nvidia had a bit of a gaming premium over amd, and crypto really boosted all GPUs...but until about 3 years ago, there wasn't literally trillions of dollars on the line to replace cuda. There is now. Companies ARE replicating it. The Mi300 is very competitive on token throughput as far as I'm aware.

No one is sitting around. I'd argue if there was more wafer supply you'd see amd/others undercutting nvidia...but it's hard to when supply is incredibly constrained.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How short-term of a thinker do you have to be to consider Nvidia's run a long time? I blame TikTok.

Nvidia has been crushing it for 30 years.

Not really. 10 years maybe. The stock price was flat-ish from 2000 to 2015 (4x or so?) and while they did have many golden years in there, they weren't universally ahead.
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