Michael Burry isn’t afraid to be controversial.
He was ridiculed by Wall Street and castigated by clients for betting against the mid-2000s housing boom, but his contrarian wager paid off when the bubble burst.
Since then, he’s come out strongly against many speculative market trends, from meme stocks and SPACs to crypto and NFTs. He’s also shorted Tesla and Palantir, leading to clashes with CEOs Elon Musk and Alex Karp, and has warned the AI boom will end badly.
The investor of “The Big Short” fame gave a fresh example of his love for controversy in a Substack post on Wednesday.
He recalled that in 2011, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson slapped “Who is JOHN GALT” on the athleisure brand’s reusable shopping bags.
Emblazoning Lululemon bags with the opening line of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” was an alienating move, Burry said. The book is beloved by many conservatives and libertarians, while Lululemon’s core demographic is young, progressive, yoga-loving women.
Burry swiftly secured one of the questionable bags. “Because my habit is to poke bears, I framed it, and it hangs in my conference room to this day,” he wrote.
“Yoga and Ayn Rand,” he continued. “They do not belong together in the same sentence let alone a tight proper noun phrase.”
Burry listed the bag’s design as one of numerous “own goals” by Lululemon that have turned off customers, squeezed margins, and pulled down its stock price from over $400 to under $120 in the past 18 months.
The investor turned writer, who counts Lululemon among his personal holdings, also blamed the company’s woes on new taxes and tariffs, product misfires, and a “management vacuum.”
Burry made the case that Lululemon is out of fashion in the AI era. But he drew a parallel to Ross Stores falling out of favor during the dot-com bubble, only for its stock to compound at nearly 21% a year for more than 25 years — double the S&P’s return excluding dividends.
Lululemon shares rose nearly 4% on Wednesday to $113. Burry said in his Substack post that at the time of writing, they were trading at around $105 a share or 2.5 times tangible book value, or the value of Lululemon’s physical and financial assets. That was the lowest multiple since the first quarter of 2009, he noted, describing that fact as “incredible.”
“I see a spring-loaded franchise, weighed down mostly by temporary factors,” Burry wrote.
“I should expect a roughly 18% CAGR over a 15 year holding period if all my assumptions are correct,” he added.
Burry framed a Lululemon bag on his firm’s wall because he enjoyed how contentious its message was. Now he may be courting controversy himself by championing an apparel stock that’s faced a raft of issues and halved in value over the past 12 months.
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