Thomas

Michael Burry might genuinely be the dumbest bear alive. He spent most of 2026 short the AI trade while it ripped higher. He shorted Micron at $1,051, pressed his Nebius short after a 34% earnings pop, and held Nvidia stock shorts through every beat. Then on September 28 he decided he wanted “more leverage” and covered his stock shorts. He swapped them for far out-of-the-money puts, and two weeks later folded most of those into broad index puts. Look at how the names he covered have done since: $CRWV: -33% $NBIS: -33% $MU: -17% $NVDA: -5% The AI cloud and memory crash he’d been predicting for a year showed up within weeks of him covering. And the switch made it worse. Stock shorts profit on every dollar the price falls. Puts struck far below the price, like his roughly $500 Micron puts, pay off only if the stock gets anywhere near that strike. Micron falling 17% from a thousand dollars barely touches them. The Nasdaq-100, where most of his short exposure now lives, is down only about 5%. He shorted CoreWeave, called it a meme-squeeze risk, covered it, and never bought the puts. It’s down a third since. Imagine being right about the AI bubble for a year, losing money on it for a year, and leaving the trade right before it finally pays. The market has absolutely no mercy. Not even for Cassandra.

I think Intel badly underestimated how quickly higher memory prices would hit PC demand and trigger an inventory correction. Those risks were already visible by the Q2 earnings call. Management acknowledged them, but still expected client revenue to hold roughly flat in Q3, supported by CPU inventory replenishment. That assumption now looks too optimistic. They should have set more conservative expectations for the client business. Still, Lip-Bu did make some encouraging comments. “We expect the industry to remain supply constrained throughout 2027 and into 2028.” “We now expect industry server CPU units to grow more than 30% in both 2026 and 2027.” “Growth would be higher in both years if additional industry supply were available.”