James Steven Chanos (born December 24, 1957) is an American investment manager. He is president and founder of Kynikos Associates, a New York City registered investment advisor focused on short selling. A noted art collector, he appeared on the BBC Four documentary The Banker's Guide to Art. Early life and education James Steven Chanos was born in 1957 into a Greek immigrant family living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that operated a chain of dry-cleaning shops. He graduated from Wylie E. Groves High School and received a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Yale University in 1980. Personal life Mr. Chanos lives in Florida. He is currently a lecturer in finance and a Becton Fellow at the Yale School of Management, where he teaches a class on the history of financial fraud. He serves as a trustee of the Nightingale-Bamford School and the New-York Historical Society and previously served as president of the board of The Browning School. Career Chanos began his career at brokerage firm Gilford Securities in 1982. While at Gilford, he performed a cash-flow analysis and made a sell recommendation that ultimately exposed Baldwin-United, which filed for bankruptcy in 1983. Shortly thereafter, Chanos was recruited to Deutsche Bank, where he analyzed Michael Milken's junk bonds and Drexel Burnham Lambert. After working as an analyst in several firms, Chanos founded Kynikos (Greek for "cynic") in 1985 with $16 million, as a firm specializing in short selling. One critical position he took at Kynikos was the shorting of Enron. He describes his investment strategy as "intensive research into stocks", looking for fundamental failures in market valuation, from underestimated or unreported failings in the business or the market of a particular stock, followed by a substantial short position which he is willing to hold for quite a long time — perhaps an opposite echo to Warren Buffett's reputed "fundamentals+long stay" investment strategy. Some have said his commitment serves as whistle-blowing more than do most speculations, as in his heavy shortselling of such companies as Baldwin-United and Enron Corporation. Throughout the 2010s, Chanos and other short sellers faced a tough environment during a booming period for M&A and a record amount of share reacquisitions. A New York Times profile of several short sellers in 2015 described Chanos and others as "waiting in the wings" for the bull market to end. The same profile described Chanos's Kynikos Associates as losing more than half