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Jim Chanos Is Bearish On China

  
Analysis, Education
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Jim Chanos is bearish on China and I think he has a very good point. China suffers from huge overcapacity in every sector and their statistics are made up.

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“Jim Chanos, head of investment firm Kynikos Associates and famous for his call to short Enron in 2001, has found his next big target.

Chanos and other China bears say the country has overcapacity in just about every sector of its economy, and the government’s massive stimulus isn’t working. They think China is simply covering things up with faulty statistics.

For example, they point to the huge reported increases in car sales in contrast to numbers showing little growth in gasoline consumption, which suggests state-run companies are buying huge numbers of cars and putting them in storage.” in The Daily Crux

Was Benjamin Graham Skillful or Lucky?

  
  Education
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Last weekend’s Intelligent Investor column looked at the extreme difficulties of disentangling skill from luck when you are evaluating investment performance. It’s the topic of an excellent new book by Michael Mauboussin and a subject of endless fascination – and frustration – to investors.

We tend to think of the greatest investors – say, Peter Lynch, George Soros, John Templeton, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham – as being mostly or entirely skillful.

Graham, of course, was the founder of security analysis as a profession, Buffett’s professor and first boss, and the author of the classic book The Intelligent Investor. He is universally regarded as one of the best investors of the 20th century.

But Graham, who outperformed the stock market by an annual average of at least 2.5 percentage points for more than two decades, coyly admitted that much of his remarkable track record may have been due to luck.

In the Postscript chapter of The Intelligent Investor, Graham described “two partners” of an investment firm who put roughly 20% of the assets they managed into a single stock – a highly unusual departure for the conservative managers, who normally diversified widely and seldom invested more than 5% or so in any one holding. (more…)

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