Headline Feb04, 2013 /

'''THE TWILIGHT CURVE!?'''

The ability to work and to focus set him apart from all other medical students. In 1998, as a resident in neurology at Stanford Hospital, he mentioned to his superiors that, between 14 hour hospital shifts, he has stayed up two nights in a row taking apart and putting back together his personal computer in an attempt to make it run faster. His superiors sent him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed Mike Burry as bipolar!!


He knew instantly that he had been misdiagnosed; how could you be bipolar if you were never depressed? Or, rather, if you were depressed only while doing your rounds  and pretending to be interested in practicing, as opposed to studying medicine?
He'd become a doctor not because he enjoyed medicine but because he didn't find medical school terribly difficult. The actual practice of medicine, on the other hand, either bored  or disgusted him!!


Of his first brush with gross anatomy: 'one scene with people carrying legs over their shoulders to the sink to wash out the feces just turned my stomach, and I was done.''
Of his feelings about the patients: ''I wanted to help people.....But not really!''


He was genuinely interested in computers, not for their own sake but for their service to lifelong obsession: the inner workings of the stock market. Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him that the stock market was a crooked place and never to be trusted, let alone invested in, the subject had fascinated him. Even as a kid he had wanted to impose logic on the world of numbers. He began to read about the market as a hobby. Pretty quickly he saw that there was no logic at all in the charts and graphs and waves and the endless chatter of many self-advertised market pros.


He sensed that he was different from other people before he understood why. Before he was two years old, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and the operation to remove the tumor had cost him his left eye.. A boy with one eye sees the world differently from everyone else, but it didn't take long for Dr Mike Burry to his literal distinction in more figurative terms.
''It took all my energy to look someone in the eye. If I am looking at you,  that's the one time I know I won't be listening to you''.
His left eye didn't line up with whomever he was trying to talk to.


But as a child he found himself with a fantastic ability to learn with or without teachers. School came easy for him  -so easy that, as an undergraduate at U.C.L.A, he could flip back and forth between English and Economics and pick up enough pre-medical training on the side to get himself admitted to the best Medical Schools in America!!
Basically everything that happened was caused, one way or the other, by his fake left eye!!
So when the 32 years old investor spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn't surprised that no one understood what he was doing!!?


This remarkable post continues. I hope you enjoy it, learn from it, and share it with the entire world. See ya morrow!!


With respectful dedication to Actress Charlize Theron. As beautiful as she is brilliant as she is, a rare human. The thinking world's true heroine!!


Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless