The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [118]
He was now looking for reasons to abandon money management. His investors were helping him to find them: He had made them a great deal of money, but they did not appear to feel compensated for the ride he had taken them on over the past three years. By June 30, 2008, any investor who had stuck with Scion Capital from its beginning, on November 1, 2000, had a gain, after fees and expenses, of 489.34 percent. (The gross gain of the fund had been 726 percent.) Over the same period, the S&P 500 returned just a bit more than 2 percent. In 2007 alone Burry had made his investors $750 million--and yet now he had only $600 million under management. His investors' requests for their money back came in hard and fast. No new investors called--not a single one. Nobody called him to solicit his views of the world, or his predictions for the future, either. So far as he could see, no one even seemed to want to know how he had done what he had done. "We have not been terribly popular," he wrote.
It outraged him that the people who got credit for higher understanding were those who spent the most time currying favor with the media. No business could be more objective than money management, and yet even in this business, facts and logic were overwhelmed by the nebulous social dimension of things. "I must say that I have been astonished by how many people now say they saw the subprime meltdown, the commodities boom, and the fading economy coming," Burry wrote, in April 2008, to his remaining investors. "And if they don't always say it in so many words, they do it by appearing on TV or extending interviews to journalists, stridently projecting their own confidence in what will happen next. And surely, these people would never have the nerve to tell you what's happening next, if they were so horribly wrong on what happened last, right? Yet I simply don't recall too many people agreeing with me back then." It was almost as if it counted against him to have been exactly right--his presence made a lot of people uncomfortable. A trade magazine published the top seventy-five hedge funds of 2007, and Scion was nowhere on it--even though its returns put it at or near the very top. "It was as if they took one swimmer in the Olympics and made him swim in a separate pool," Burry said. "His time won the gold. But he got no medal. I honestly think that's what killed it for me. I was looking for some recognition. There was none. I trained for the Olympics, and then they told me to go and swim in the retard pool." A few of his remaining investors asked why he hadn't been more aggressive on the public relations--as if that were a part of the business!
In early October 2008, after the U.S. government had stepped in to say it would, in effect, absorb all the losses in the financial system and prevent any big Wall Street firm from failing, Burry had started to buy stocks with enthusiasm, for the first time in years. The stimulus would lead inevitably to inflation, he thought, but also to a boom in stock prices. He might be early, of course, and stocks might fall some before they rose, but that didn't matter to him: The value was now there, and the bet would work out in the long run. Immediately, his biggest remaining investor, who had $150 million in the fund, questioned his judgment and threatened to pull his money out.
On October 27, Burry wrote to one of his two e-mail friends: "I'm selling off the positions tonight. I think I hit a breaking point. I haven't eaten today, I'm not