The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [20]
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."
Investing was something you had to learn how to do on your own, in your own peculiar way. Burry had no real money to invest, but he nevertheless dragged his obsession along with him through high school, college, and medical school. He'd reached Stanford Hospital without ever taking a class in finance or accounting, let alone working for any Wall Street firm. He had maybe $40,000 in cash, against $145,000 in student loans. He had spent the previous four years working medical student hours. Nevertheless, he had found time to make himself a financial expert of sorts. "Time is a variable continuum," he wrote to one of his e-mail friends, one Sunday morning in 1999:
An afternoon can fly by or it can take 5 hours. Like you probably do, I productively fill the gaps that most people leave as dead time. My drive to be productive probably cost me my first marriage and a few days ago almost cost me my fiancee. Before I went to college the military had this "we do more before 9am than most people do all day" and I used to think and I do more than the military. As you know there are some select people that just find a drive in certain activities that supersedes EVERYTHING else.
He wasn't bipolar. He was merely isolated and apart, without actually feeling lonely or deeply unhappy. He didn't regard himself as a tragedy; he thought, among other things, that his unusual personality enabled him to concentrate better than other people. All of it followed, in his mind, from the warping effects of his fake eye. "That's why I thought people thought I was different," he said. "That's why I thought I was different." Thinking himself different, he didn't find what happened to him when he collided with Wall Street nearly as bizarre as it was.
Late one night in November 1996, while on a cardiology rotation at St. Thomas Hospital, in Nashville, Tennessee, he logged on to a hospital computer and went to a message board called techstocks.com. There he created a thread called value investing. Having read everything there was to read about investing, he decided to learn a bit more about "investing in the real world." A mania for Internet stocks gripped the market. A site for the Silicon Valley investor, circa 1996, was not a natural home for a sober-minded value investor. Still, many came, all with opinions. A few people grumbled about the very idea of a doctor having anything useful to say about investments, but over time he came to dominate the discussion. Dr. Mike Burry--as he always signed himself--sensed that other people on the thread were taking his advice and making money with it.
Once he figured out he had nothing more to learn from the crowd on his thread, he quit it to create what later would be