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Kynikos Associates
$225 Million
Short-selling activist James Chanos appears on the list of top earners for the first time after his aptly named Ursus Fund (“ursus” is Latin for “bear”) surged 60 percent in 2008.
His great year stems from his shorting of financial, real estate, construction, engineering and auto company stocks. He also cashed in on a bet that shares of auction house Sotheby’s would go south, riding them down from nearly $60 a share in 2007 to $8. His most significant long position was the $20 million purchase of a triplex in New York on 75th Street near Fifth Avenue.
Chanos, 51, began to establish his reputation just two years after graduating from Yale University, when as an analyst at Gilford Securities in 1982 he identified accounting irregularities at Baldwin-United Corp., a piano maker that was also selling insurance. It eventually filed for bankruptcy. Later he came to prominence as one of the first investors to question the accounting practices at Enron Corp. Chanos launched Kynikos Associates in 1985; today it has about $6 billion in assets.
