Burry, Scion Capital Founder, Bets on Gold, Farmland

Dr. Michael Burry, who predicted the collapse in mortgages and made huge profits for himself and his investors at Scion Capital LLC by betting against subprime mortgage bonds, said in a September 7 interview with Bloomberg News that his current monies were riding on gold and arable farmland properties with water, as well as small Asian technology firms.

Burry’s previous bets against the mortgage bubble, documented in an April Vanity Fair article and in the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis, were wildly successful, owing at least in part to his attention to detail and willingness to plod through thousands of documents. The former hedge fund manager, who left medicine as a career to found the firm he named after a favorite Terry Brooks fantasy novel, “The Scions of Shannara,” used to write about his investing strategies in the wee hours of the morning after a day’s work in medicine. Once his strategies began to attract notice from large firms, including Vanguard, he opened Scion. Later he would convince Goldman Sachs to sell him credit default swaps against CDOs he’d researched as primed to fail.