Trading Your Own Money: A Beautiful Way to Go Broke Slowly

Prop firms let you trade up to $200K without risking your savings. Pass one evaluation, get funded, keep 90% of profits.

Sounds perfect until you hit the fine print: consistency rules, trailing drawdowns, news restrictions—basically a minefield of payout denials.

Lark's New 1-Step Model is suspiciously straightforward:

✅ 7% max drawdown (highest in the industry).
✅ $1,000 Base Monthly Reward even during losing months.
✅ Free second chances.
✅ Zero consistency traps.
✅ Zero news restrictions.

They've been paying traders for 3+ years. If it was a scam, they'd be bankrupt.

→ larkfunding.com

🤯 Michael Burry Just Accidentally Built a $6M/Year Business in 30 Days

Remember Michael Burry? The guy who predicted the 2008 housing crisis, got immortalized in The Big Short, and spent the last decade trolling markets on Twitter before deleting his account every few months?

Yeah, he just figured out something most hedge fund managers never will: You don't need to manage billions under stress to print millions in income.

Here's the absolutely bonkers math that's breaking FinTwit's collective brain right now.

📊 The Numbers That Don't Lie

Michael Burry launched a Substack less than a month ago. Not a year. Not six months. Less than 30 days.

He's already sitting at over 156,000 subscribers.

His offering is simple:

• Free tier (market commentary, occasional insights)

• Paid tier at $39/month (deeper analysis, trade ideas, the good stuff)

Now let's do the math that's making every struggling newsletter writer (including us) question their life choices.

Assumption: 10% conversion rate to paid

Is 10% realistic for someone with Burry's notoriety? Absolutely. He predicted the biggest financial crisis in modern history and has a cult following that hangs on his every deleted tweet. If anything, 10% might be conservative.

156,000 subscribers × 10% = 15,600 paid subscribers

15,600 × $39/month = $608,400/month in gross revenue

But Substack takes approximately 10-15% in fees (payment processing + platform cut). Let's use 15% to be conservative.

$608,400 × 85% = $517,140/month net

$517,140 × 12 months = $6,205,680/year

🏦 The Hedge Fund Comparison That Hurts

Here's where it gets really wild.

A traditional hedge fund charging a 2% management fee would need $310 million in assets under management to generate the same $6.2M annual income.

Let that sink in.

Burry's making the equivalent of running a $310M AUM hedge fund—except:

❌ No regulatory headaches
❌ No investor relations drama
❌ No compliance nightmares
❌ No redemption requests when markets tank
❌ No sleepless nights worrying about drawdowns
❌ No institutional pressure to perform every quarter

Just him, a keyboard, and 156,000 people paying $39/month to read his thoughts.

📈 And It's Only Growing

The numbers above assume his subscriber count stays flat. It won't.

Every time Burry drops a banger post, it goes viral on Twitter. Every time markets do something insane and he calls it, more people subscribe. Every time CNBC mentions him (which they will), that number climbs.

If he hits 200,000 subscribers with the same 10% conversion:

• 20,000 paid subs × $39 = $780K/month

• $780K × 85% = $663K/month net

• $7.956M/year

That's the equivalent of a $400M AUM hedge fund without managing a single dollar of client money.

🎯 Why This Model Is Genius (And Terrifying for Traditional Finance)

Scalability:
Burry writes one post. 156,000 people read it. The marginal cost of subscriber 156,001? Zero.

Compare that to a hedge fund: every additional dollar under management adds operational complexity, regulatory burden, and risk.

Control:
He owns the platform. No investors to answer to. No redemption gates. No quarterly letters explaining why his drawdown was "temporary market dislocation."

Optionality:
If he wants to take three months off? Fine. If he wants to pivot to writing about something else? Fine. If he wants to shut it down tomorrow? Also fine.

Try doing any of that with a $310M hedge fund.

Intellectual Property:
His ideas, his analysis, his brand. No dilution. No co-investment agreements. No carried interest splits.

🤔 Is This Replicable?

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Not for most people.

Burry has:

• A proven track record of one of the greatest macro calls in history

• A movie about his life starring Christian Bale

• Cult-level name recognition in finance

• Decades of credibility

Most newsletter writers don't have that. Hell, most hedge fund managers don't have that.

But the model itself? Absolutely scalable for anyone with expertise and audience.

Look at what's happening:

• Financial analysts leaving banks to start paid newsletters

• Traders ditching hedge funds to monetize their following

• Economists building six-figure Substacks with no overhead

The barrier to entry is a keyboard and something valuable to say. The upside? Potentially millions in recurring revenue with near-zero marginal cost.

💡 The Bigger Picture

This isn't just about Michael Burry making $6M/year writing a newsletter (though that's wild enough).

This is about the democratization of financial media and the death of the traditional "build AUM to make money" model.

Why raise $500M, deal with compliance, stress about redemptions, and take on tons of responsibility when you can write your thoughts, charge $39/month, and scale to millions in revenue?

The hedge fund model assumed information scarcity and access were the moats. But in 2025, distribution and credibility are the moats—and Substack hands you the distribution platform for free.

✍🏻 The Munch Take:

Michael Burry just built the economic equivalent of a $310M hedge fund in 30 days with a Substack and a reputation. No compliance team, no investment committee—just insights people will pay for.

Traditional finance is quietly panicking because the gatekeepers just became optional. If you're a talented trader grinding for salary and phantom carried interest, you're probably staring at this math having an existential crisis.

Here's the thing: You don't need a newsletter to prove you can trade—you need capital and a fair shot. That's literally why Lark Funding exists. No traditional finance bureaucracy, just a clear path to get funded and keep 90% of what you earn.

The creator economy already disrupted media. Prop trading is doing the same to hedge funds.

— Pip Munch

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