May 2012
Beginner
272 pages
7h 8m
English
book
The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds
by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 8
The Cynical Sleuth
Shorting is not a criminal trial. It doesn’t have to be beyond a reasonable doubt. There just has to be a preponderance of evidence.
—James Chanos, February 2011 interview
There’s a lot about Enron that still hasn’t been fully explained or written about,” Jim Chanos says earnestly one February afternoon in his office. Snow falls on Madison Avenue as Chanos searches his memory for details. He is tanned, having just returned from a conference in Miami. With wavy light brown hair and glasses, Chanos looks at home behind his gargantuan circular chestnut desk in a deep blue suit. The 54-year-old head of Kynikos Associates LP was the first to uncover the shocking accounting scandal after a friend flagged a “Heard in Texas” story in the Wall Street Journal in September 2000. He thought the article was right up Chanos’s alley.
The story by Jonathan Weil was about energy companies using accounting ploys. “Much of these companies’ recent profits constitute unrealized, noncash gains,” Weil found.
“Almost immediately after reading the article I pulled up the financial statements for Dynergy, Enron, Reliant, and Mirant. And it was very clear from them that the biggest and baddest was also the murkiest—Enron,” says Chanos. So he first dug into the quarterly (10Q) and annual (10K) financial statements.
“I remember the numbers had gotten worse over nine months,” says Chanos. “We looked at insider selling, which was a huge pattern ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.