Kynikos Capital Partners owner Jim Chanos told The Financial Times that in the age of COVID-19 and volatile politics in the United States that, “this market is setting up to be one of the great short opportunities of all time. Trouble’s coming, I don’t know when, but it’s coming,” he said.

In short selling, an investor borrows a stock, sells the stock, and then buys the stock back to return it to the lender, betting it will drop in price and if so, they buy it back at a lower price to return to the lender, making a profit off the difference.

Chanos has gotten very rich with the practice, picking up $100 million recently by shorting Wirecard, the German payment processor before it collapsed in a criminal scandal, rattling markets.

He claimed we’re in a “golden age of fraud,” describing the current market climate as rife with euphoria, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and Trumpian “post-truth” politics –  “a really fertile field for people to play fast and loose with the truth, and for corporate wrongdoers to get away with it for a long time,” he said.