[qeternity]

It isn’t. CNN and many others have awful financial literacy and reporting standards.

The 13F notional value calculations are horrendous. There is simply no way of knowing how big of a bet it is, but I can all but guarantee that it isn’t remotely close to 80% of his portfolio.

[edwiecron]

This headline has been making the rounds. Super bearish news from the “Big Short” guy sells headlines.

This reminds me of the Litecoin / Walmart news where someone paid a journalist to report a bs headline. But at a larger scale.

[WheelsAtLarge]

You are right. I'm one that believes that the market will continue its downturn for a few more weeks but there's no way I would bet 80% of my portfolio even if I was 99.99% sure of a downturn. I know better and I'm an amateur. Burry is a professional, he knows better than to be so reckless. The news article is just reporting nonsense. With options it's easy to lose it all even if ultimately you were right since options expire after a period of time. You have to be very careful if you decide to use them as an investment tool. I have no doubt he's betting on a downturn but he's not betting most of his assets. What ever it is, it's small relative to his portfolio.

[gizajob]

He's also basically shorting S&P and Nasdaq ETFs - $1.8billion is a blip against these, like throwing a pebble at an oil tanker...yet the article seems to have an air about it like the very presence of this man and this money is enough to help precipitate his expected downturn.

The market does seem overpriced at the moment, particularly stocks like Nvidia undergoing some kind of correction, but it seems that the medium term trajectory is on the rise. I'm not sure what kind of huge downturn the market isn't going to be able to account for when phenomenal, unprecedented shocks like COVID are something it took in its stride even though prices are still recovering due to the debt so many companies took on. The bullish run of the past 6 months seems to have taken analysts by surprise so to be expected that some of them are now betting against its turn in the other direction.

[rchaud]

The covid shock was managed because almost every government switched to expansionary fiscal and monetary policy to keep unemployment down. Interest rates have gone up massively, and Covid relief payments have dried up.

[mpixel]

heck, it might even be larger-than-usual hedge where he thinks a crash is possible and the reward is relatively high to the small loss he'd be making, there's a lot of nuance skipped over here.

[YeBanKo]

He might be sitting on a bunch of QQQ and SPY and just hedge against the price drop. I don’t know if reporting requirements are the same for long puts vs protective. Can anyone familiar with the topic elaborate?

[qeternity]

"Protective" puts are the same thing as long puts. Doesn't matter if you own underlying against.

What doesn't have to be reported are shorts, so he could very well be long put spreads but the short leg would never be reported.

There is really very little point in trying to read the 13F tea leaves.