Jim Chanos' 16 Favorite Long Stock Picks

Hedge funds sell themselves as investments for elites and justify their extraordinary expenses mainly by appealing to elites egos. Well, hedge funds by and large do poorly. This is largely due to huge expenses. Add to that the incentives managers have to take huge risks: the managers often get 20% of extraordinary gains and if they lose, well you lose your money. These incentives to take huge risks do mean a few hedge funds do spectacularly well each year (of course more usually do spectacularly poorly over time).

Market Folly submits:Short selling and Jim Chanos go hand in hand. Whenever you see his name, you instantly think of Enron and how he unveiled the fraud there. The Kynikos Associates hedge fund manager is worth following due to his success but maybe more-so for the fact that he makes so many public appearances. If hedge funds operate behind a shroud of secrecy, then short sellers typically operate behind a shroud ten times as secret.

By Value Research:Jim Chanos, manager of Kynikos Associates, focuses on short-selling stocks. Investors who seek to find investments on the long side which do not alarm professional short-sellers like Mr. Chanos can look to regulatory filings to find the companies Kynikos holds as long positions. Kynikos holds these long positions based on individual merit or as hedges for its short positions in other, questionable firms.

By Stocks & Shares:Jim Chanos, manager of Kynikos focuses on short-selling stocks. Investors who seek to find investments on the long side which do not alarm professional short-sellers like Mr. Chanos can look to regulatory filings to find the companies Kynikos were recently buying. Recent additions include Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Liberty Media (

Insider Monkey submits: D.E. Shaw & Co, founded in 1988 by David Elliot Shaw, is one of the largest quant funds in the world. Its latest 13F portfolio had $39 Billion in stocks and options. Usually it’s not practical to imitate quantitative hedge funds like D.E. Shaw or Jim Simons’ Renaissance because they hold most of their holdings for less than a few weeks.

Insider Monkey submits: Shortseller Jim Chanos has a stellar reputation. He picks shorts from the industries that are going through innovation and creating a lot of technological obsolescence. Several years ago he handsomely profited from the decline of Kodak (EK) and Blockbuster.

Back in the 1980's, Jim Chanos made a name for himself by shorting Baldwin United.

By Insider Monkey: We are do-it-yourself investors. Our favorite hedge funds are the ones that have outstanding long stock picks because we like to imitate these hedge fund managers and don't want to pay the customary 2-and-20. Most hedge fund managers have more skill in picking long positions than shorting stocks, so we don't really miss out much by not handing over our hard-earned dollars to super-rich hedge fund managers.