October 2011
Beginner
186 pages
4h 31m
English
book
The Greatest Trades of All Time: Top Traders Making Big Profits from the Crash of 1929 to Today
by Vincent W. Veneziani
Content preview from The Greatest Trades of All Time: Top Traders Making Big Profits from the Crash of 1929 to Today
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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 2
James Chanos: The Real King of Enron
Jim Chanos loves Girl Scout Cookies. Thin Mints, to be exact. He struts into the conference room of his hedge fund, Kynikos Associates, with a box of them in tow. He sits down and offers me one before we begin our long talk about how one man became a billionaire off Enron while Enron burned to the ground. It plays out a bit like the fall of Rome, except with higher stakes.
Chanos, a Yale-educated short seller, is without a doubt the most famous trader in this book. He started his fund, Kynikos Associates, in 1985 with an adequate amount of capital, an amount that easily made it so he could short distressed firms to his heart's content. And no company would be safe. From Drexel Burnham Lambert to Tyco to Boston Market, Chanos shorted them all and took with him a princely reward. His talent was for spotting companies that were bound for failure.
ENTER ENRON
Enron came to prominence in the 1990s. Because of its demise, Chanos would ultimately end up making the greatest trade of his life. Shorting Enron was incredibly lucrative due to the longtime extent of corruption within the company. The company would go on to become the largest bankruptcy the United States has ever witnessed, and Chanos was along for the entire ride.
Before examining the trades associated with the collapse of Enron, we must first examine what exactly Enron was. Enron Corporation was an energy company. However, it was not an energy company in the sense that Enron ...
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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.