James Steven Chanos was born in 1957 into a Greek immigrant family living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that operated a chain of dry-cleaning shops.
[3] He graduated from Wylie E. Groves High School and received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Political Science from Yale University in 1980.
[8] Shortly thereafter, Chanos was recruited to Deutsche Bank, where he analyzed Michael Milken's junk bonds and Drexel Burnham Lambert.
[11] He describes his investment strategy as "intensive research into stocks",[12] 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.
[9] 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.
[14] 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.
[15] In November 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chanos will close his hedge fund and return outside capital to investors by the end of the year.
Later on the Charlie Rose Show in April 2010 he maintained that China was on a "treadmill to hell" that would result in a crash caused by a "world class" property bubble.
"[20] In a September 2021 New York Times article on the Chinese property sector crisis (2020–present), it was noted "...Jim Chanos, a prominent American investor, warned that China’s real-estate excesses had placed it on a 'treadmill to hell' and that the bubble might burst at any point.
"[22] Chanos has held a critical view of the Chinese economy since 2009-10, around the time when he began issuing dire predictions about China's real estate market.
During a Schechter Wealth forum event in December 2017 he noted, "in the past few years...we've reduced our China short and our global fund to the lowest its been".
[33] Chanos took and closed a short position on Luckin Coffee Inc. in 2020 on the advice of fellow short-seller Carson Block of Muddy Waters Research.
[34] The stock dropped 70% in April 2020 after the company disclosed in a securities filing that its chief operating officer had fabricated about 2.2 billion yuan ($310 million) of reported 2019 sales.
The stock was down 54% since its IPO as of July 2022 as investor concerns regarding increasing pressure on Beyond Meat's margins as mentioned in the Financial Times article by Arun Sundaram, an analyst at CFRA.