Post by aterry on Mar 17, 2010 10:55:39 GMT -5
I'm not sure where this belongs; or if it's appropriate to post. I think it's inspiring. I heard this on NPR. Below is an excerpt. Here is a guy with Asperger's who saw through the financial fraud and nonsense that brought about the recession.
"Wall Street's Heroes And Demons
One of the characters in Lewis' latest Wall Street saga is an unlikely hero, Michael Burry. He's a young hedge fund manager based in San Jose, Calif., who has Asperger's syndrome.
Originally a neurologist, Burry quit being a doctor during his residency at Stanford Hospital because of a stock market blog he wrote in his spare time. One day, Burry posted a message saying that he was sick of medicine and he planned to go into investing. Two major stock market investors tracked him down to stake him to a business investing in the stock market.
Burry's track record over the next few years, Lewis tells NPR's Robert Siegel, was astonishing.
Discovering Disaster
Then Burry began to realize that the futures of several companies he was investing in turned on a weird lending market, the subprime mortgage bond market. So he started reading the prospectuses of subprime mortgage bond offerings. In the structure of the loans, Burry could see the future disaster. So he figured out how to use this knowledge to his advantage, and he became the first investor off Wall Street to make the big bet against them.
You have this body of facts out there in the financial world, and the vast majority of the people in that world are organizing the facts into one kind of picture -- and it's a pretty picture. And a handful of other people take the exact same facts, but they organize it into a different picture.
- Michael Lewis
Burry went in so early that his investors thought he was crazy.
"He ends up feeling more cynical about Wall Street than anybody I've ever met because of his dealings with the Wall Street firms," Lewis says.
Because he didn't have much connection with people, everything Burry did was via e-mail. So Lewis says, in researching his book, he got to benefit from a perfect, real-time record of what was going on in these markets.
"The one guy that I could trust in the middle of this crisis was this fellow with Asperger's and a glass eye," he says "He became the moral center of this market for me because he was the most honest character."
"Wall Street's Heroes And Demons
One of the characters in Lewis' latest Wall Street saga is an unlikely hero, Michael Burry. He's a young hedge fund manager based in San Jose, Calif., who has Asperger's syndrome.
Originally a neurologist, Burry quit being a doctor during his residency at Stanford Hospital because of a stock market blog he wrote in his spare time. One day, Burry posted a message saying that he was sick of medicine and he planned to go into investing. Two major stock market investors tracked him down to stake him to a business investing in the stock market.
Burry's track record over the next few years, Lewis tells NPR's Robert Siegel, was astonishing.
Discovering Disaster
Then Burry began to realize that the futures of several companies he was investing in turned on a weird lending market, the subprime mortgage bond market. So he started reading the prospectuses of subprime mortgage bond offerings. In the structure of the loans, Burry could see the future disaster. So he figured out how to use this knowledge to his advantage, and he became the first investor off Wall Street to make the big bet against them.
You have this body of facts out there in the financial world, and the vast majority of the people in that world are organizing the facts into one kind of picture -- and it's a pretty picture. And a handful of other people take the exact same facts, but they organize it into a different picture.
- Michael Lewis
Burry went in so early that his investors thought he was crazy.
"He ends up feeling more cynical about Wall Street than anybody I've ever met because of his dealings with the Wall Street firms," Lewis says.
Because he didn't have much connection with people, everything Burry did was via e-mail. So Lewis says, in researching his book, he got to benefit from a perfect, real-time record of what was going on in these markets.
"The one guy that I could trust in the middle of this crisis was this fellow with Asperger's and a glass eye," he says "He became the moral center of this market for me because he was the most honest character."
