Whether you're a fan of ARK Invest's thematic funds focusing on disruptive innovation
or you're someone who tracks the moves of incredible value investors like Warren Buffett,
you're probably aware of the on-going clash between Michael Burry and Cathie Wood. In case
you're not, here's the short and sweet version. Earlier this summer, Michael Burry tweeted that we
are in the greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things by two orders of magnitude. If true,
that would be quite the bummer. Around that time, the SEC filings of Burry's hedge fund, Scion Asset
Management, revealed that he has a $530 million dollar bet against Tesla. Tesla is, of course,
Cathie Wood's largest position in three separate ARK Invest funds and is ARK Invest's biggest
investment overall. Cathie Wood has well over $3 billion dollars invested in Tesla. The LATEST SEC
filings for Scion Asset Management revealed that Michael Burry now also has 30 million dollars in
put options betting directly against ARKK, ARK Invest's massive flagship innovation fund. He
also increased his short position on Tesla to over $700 million dollars. Cathie Wood responded to
that with a series of tweets addressing inflation versus deflation, bubbles versus strong markets,
and growth opportunities versus value traps, ending her twitter thread with this. To his
credit, Michael Burry made a great call based on fundamentals and recognized the calamity brewing
in the housing and mortgage market. I do not believe that he understands the fundamentals
that are creating explosive growth and investment opportunities in the innovation space. It's easy
to take everything I just shared with you and run with the narrative of bear versus bull, value
versus speculation, inflation versus deflation, bubble versus real exponential market growth.
The truth is, this is a battle of short-term versus long-term and in my opinion, all of those
other arguments are just symptoms of the time frames that Michael Burry and Cathie Wood are
operating on. Let me explain. It's currently September 2021 and unless Michael Burry has
access to special options, his options will expire in less than 2 years from now,
even sooner for some of his earlier options contracts. Over 500 million dollars of his 700
million dollar bet against Tesla was made in the first quarter of this year, when Tesla was trading
close to 900 dollars per share after rallying by something like eight hundred percent. It wouldn't
be surprising to find out that Michael Burry is already in the money with his short position on
Tesla, just like it won't be surprising that Cathie Wood will continue to make a lot of
money on her long position on Tesla over the next 5 years. In my opinion, Tesla is a fundamentally
misunderstood company because it spans many different market sectors, industries,
and technologies ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to energy generation and
storage. That's why so much of my content focuses on the science and engineering going on at Tesla.
The way I see it, ARK Invest focuses on making long-term gains by understanding technologies that
most of the market doesn't, while Michael Burry focuses on making shorter-term gains directly from
these misunderstandings themselves, by making big bets when a company's valuation doesn't align with
its balance sheet one way or the other. Here's the issue: when one or two balance sheets look
bad compared to their valuations, you can write it off as those specific companies being too richly
valued. That explains Burry's short position on Tesla. His short position against ARKK is far more
interesting because when every company's balance sheet starts to look bad, you're forced into one
of two positions: the short-term position that we must be in the greatest speculative bubble of all
time in all things by two orders of magnitude or the long-term position that technology and
innovation are somehow allowing newer companies and markets to scale much faster than they used
to, justifying SOME of these higher multiples. Now that we've re-framed the debate as short-term
versus long-term, here's a quick clip from Cathie Wood's recent interview on CNBC's Tech Check,
where she explains this exact phenomenon and how it's actually good for her strategy:
So, it's obvious to Cathie Wood that we're not in a bubble because bubbles show certain
signs and patterns that we're not seeing in the market today, like extreme bullishness and high
momentum across the board. If we take a look at the American Association of Individual Investors
Sentiment Survey, we can see that bullishness is at 43.4% percent,
a little higher than the historical average of 38% percent, but a far cray away from even the
1-year bullish high of 57% percent we saw this past spring or the over 70% percent before the
dot com bust 20 years ago. Also, one-third of all surveyed market participants are bearish
right now, which is slightly higher than the historical average. If it were a bubble,
I'd expect the bear-to-bull ratio to be a lot more, well, bullish. All this negative sentiment
is actually great for Cathie Wood's strategy because she actively trades into stocks she feels
are getting discounted way more than they should be. People who think that ARK Invest is somehow
stuck in one position or another aren't paying attention to the holdings inside these funds;
they shift all the time. Earlier this summer, I made multiple episodes highlighting Cathie
Wood's massive moves away from genomics stocks and into deeply discounted web technology stocks
inside ARKK specifically. Cathie Wood loaded up on stocks like Twilio, Coinbase, Twitter,
Palantir, Draftkings, UiPath, and Unity Software. Since then, ARKK is up over 25% percent and many
of the stocks inside the fund are up by way more than that. Michael Burry is an incredibly
smart investor, so he'd be crazy to bet against Cathie Wood as a stock picker. So the question
we should be asking is: what exactly is he betting against with his short position on ARKK and why?
Yeah, just listen to the language here. Wright's Law. Declining production costs and projections
of demand. The truth is that these two investors aren't fighting because they're not even speaking
the same language. Michael Burry is treating ARKK like an index of stocks that are very sensitive
to inflation and rising interest rates. He's betting that inflation will go up in the SHORT
TERM, causing the value of this particular basket of stocks to go down in the SHORT TERM. Cathie
Wood is saying that deflationary forces are going to outweigh inflation over the LONG TERM and in
some cases, like the cost declines associated with electric vehicles, sooner than we expect.
And again, if you recognize their different time-horizons, Michael Burry and Cathie Wood
can both be right. Let's start with inflation. During the height of the pandemic, people were
stuck inside, so they were working on their homes and stocking up on stuff. That caused businesses
to double- and triple-order inventories, causing a lack of supply. As a result, we saw the cost
of household goods and commodities like lumber go way up. Lumber is already down by two-thirds from
its highs in early May. That inflation had two properties; it was focused on goods specifically,
since that's where people were pouring their money instead of services and experiences,
and it's temporary because services and experiences won't be shut down forever. Now
the opposite is true. As services and experiences come back into the mix, they'll be able to charge
more because there's a lot of pent-up demand and limited capacities. Traveling, going out to shows,
and so on will all cost more than they did pre-pandemic until this pent-up demand is filled,
so again, there is price inflation, but it's narrowly focused, near-term, and temporary.
Now let's talk about the deflationary forces. I already covered the first one, which is the
price of stuff coming down as pent-up demand gets filled. The second type of deflation is actually
good deflation, which is technology getting cheaper to produce thanks to Wright's Law. If you
want to learn all about Wight's Law, you can check out one of my very first episodes where I lay out
exactly how it works. [clip of that episode] The channel has come a long way but if you want
to check out that episode, I'll link it in the top right-hand corner of your screen right now
and in the description below as well. It's a real nail-biter. The effects of Wright's Law
and good deflation are everywhere. Think about the first iPhone versus the iPhone today or the first
laptop versus laptops today. This is the same type of good deflation that's responsible for electric
vehicles getting cheaper as the costs of batteries and industrial robots and so on continue to go
down. That lets these innovative companies to produce even more of their products and services,
which lowers the cost, which increases demand, which results in more production,
and that virtuous cycle goes on and on. When Cathie Wood talks about wanting companies to
spend money today to dominate winner-take-most markets in the long-term, she's talking about
them investing in this cycle of lowering costs to greatly increase demand to the point where entire
markets and ecosystems are built on top of their platforms. The final type of deflation is called
creative destruction, which is a creative way of saying that non-innovative companies are going
to get destructed because they can't deliver the same performance at the same price point. Again,
let's think about electric vehicles in general and Tesla specifically. The Tesla Model S Plaid
is the current record holder for going zero to sixty miles per hour, which it does in just under
two seconds. It also costs a fraction of the price of most of the cars on this list. And,
as you can see, more and more cars near the top of this list are all-electric and dual-motor. So,
if you're building cars on a different platform, say, an internal combustion engine, and that
platform can't compete in performance, what do you do? You cut your prices. That's permanent,
not temporary, because it creates a vicious cycle where lower prices means less profit means less
production and investment in innovation, which means less performance improvement over time,
which means lowering prices again, and so on. Winners keep extending their lead and losers keep
losing ground over time. That's creative destruction, also known as bad deflation.
So how is it that ARK Invest figured this out? Here's a clip of Cathie Wood
putting it all together.
Wright's Law, cost decline trajectories, price elasticity of demand, trends crossing
the tipping point. I'm not saying that Cathie Wood is smarter than Michael Burry or that ARK Invest
is better than Scion Asset Management. What I am saying is Cathie Wood set up ARK Invest
to understand the market from a completely different perspective than traditional asset
managers: technology platforms, not just earnings reports. The truth is, if you stop worrying about
the average P E ratio of the S and P 500 and start researching the remarkable pace of innovation,
you'll see that the real risk... is investing in the companies that are getting left behind.
This is ticker symbol you.
My name is Alex, reminding you, that the best investment you can make, is in you.