When an investor believes a stock is overvalued and will soon drop in price, he might decide to ‘short’ it. First, he borrows an amount of the stock, and then sells it. He waits for the stock to tank before buying back the same amount of shares at a deflated price. After returning the shares to his lender, he pockets the difference—unless any one of several hard-to-predict variables interferes, and the stock fails to drop.
Since these variables are so hard to predict, short selling is difficult for even seasoned investors. It takes great talent and experience to isolate the best short ideas for falling stocks—skills Amit Kumar developed and honed over decades of market analysis and trading. This book shares his short-selling framework, built on themes common to falling stocks and the market’s endemic strengths and cycles. Featuring key case studies and exclusive interviews with successful fund managers Bill Ackman (Pershing Square Capital Management) and Mark Roberts (Off Wall Street Consulting Group), Kumar shows investors how to avoid traps and profit from well-researched short ideas. Investors may not always act on short ideas, but they can avoid losses by using Kumar’s framework to identify overvalued stocks. Professionals and amateur investors alike will benefit from this fundamental research approach, which transforms short selling into a long-term strategy.
Inhoudsopgave
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Framework to Finding Short Ideas
1. Due Diligence in Short Selling
2. Leveraged Businesses: The Upside and Downside
3. Structural Issues in Industries
4. Recipes for Cooked Books: Accounting Misstatements and Shenanigans
5. The World Is Going to End
Part II: How Successful Investors and Analysts Think
6. Value Investing
7. Activist Investing
8. Papa Bear: Coattailing Marquee Investors or Betting Against Them?
9. Off Wall Street: Two Decades of Successful Shorting
Part III: Risks and Mechanics of Short Selling
10. When to Hold, When to Fold
11. The Mechanics of Short Selling
Glossary
Notes
Index
Over de auteur
Amit Kumar is a senior analyst at Columbia Threadneedle Investments. He has spent nine years in equity investments and, before that, another nine years in senior roles in the technology industry. He is also an adjunct professor of finance at Rutgers Business School.