Hunter is the author of the Distressed Debt Investing blog. His commentary has been seen in online versions of WSJ, FT, and BusinessWeek. Hunter currently works as an investing professional at a large money manager, focused on the credit markets. Previously, he worked at two large hedge funds, as an analyst working on distressed debt and event-driven investing situations.

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One of our favorite investors of all time, Michael Burry, who I personally have been following for quite some time, gave a speech tonight at Vanderbilt University entitled: “Missteps to Mayhem: Inside the Doomsday Machine with the Outsider who Predicted and Profited from America’s Financial Armageddon”. Distressed Debt Investing was there (we have our tentacles everywhere) and are pleased to bring you notes from the speech. Enjoy!

As indicated by the lecture’s title most of Dr. Burry’s material was a blow-by-blow account of how and why the housing bubble occurred and how he profited from the resultant crash. To put his presentation in context, it is worth noting that the audience was comprised of people from many different academic and professional backgrounds. As such, much of the content was already familiar to those who’ve read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short and/or his Vanity Fair article. I assume the Distressed Debt Investing community is familiar with these works so my notes are focused on things I thought were not discussed in those works and interesting anecdotes that provide insight into his thought process.

To begin I was impressed with the turnout. I’ve heard that Vanderbilt’s Chancellor series is popular, but I was surprised that the approximately 500 seat lecture hall was well beyond capacity with at least 100 people sitting in the aisles or standing along the walls. The audience was very diverse with several doctors (Burry was a Vandy med school graduate), a priest and a fairly even mix of students and professionals.