Kynikos has been around for almost 20 years—an aeon in hedge-fund terms—and is one of the few funds focusing exclusively on short selling to have survived the long bull market. Chanos is always on the lookout for overvalued stocks, but more than that, he’s a kind of financial sleuth, who scours balance sheets and financial documents searching for clues that something might be awry inside a company. Although he doesn’t get them all right—in 1995, Chanos was run over shorting AOL—his batting average in recent years is high.
