I think it makes sense. I am inclined to think timberland in the U.S. is an attractive investment, maybe even very attractive, although you need $50 million to $100 million to buy in on a diversified basis. There are some REITs offering timberland, but they are not as cheap as an investor would wish.

Photo ops and public adulation may be a successful short seller’s undoing. There is the story of a hedgehog you call Jock Robinson, Prince of Blackness, who specialized in short positions in doomed stocks. When the heads of an overly optimistic company you call Casino Resorts recognized that the guy asking all those questions at their analysts’ meetings was none other than Prince Jock, they fought back and managed to turn a surefire losing property into a hot ticket.

Yes, that is one of the difficulties of being a professional short seller. The other thing that makes it a not-very-appealing business from my point of view is that you’re fighting the trend in which stocks in the U.S. go up an average of 9 percent a year. The majority of the time you get the wind in your face.

You come down hard on the large investment management firms, too, with the view that the businessmen who run them "don’t seem to know or want to know how to create an environment that can produce alpha or generate consistent absolute returns for clients. Instead, they are giant factories, in business to increase fee-paying assets under management."

I think what makes sense is the strategy used by David Swenson, who runs the Yale Endowment. He says Yale will invest money only through firms where the portfolio managers run and own the firm. No matter how good the record is, Yale will never invest money through a firm that is owned or controlled by an investment bank. Since he took over as chief investment officer in 1985, the endowment has compounded at 16.1 percent per annum, the best record of any university endowment. David was a good friend of mine when I was at Morgan Stanley, but we never got any money from him.

For individual investors, I’m not saying this is easy to do or find, but you ought to use as your wealth managers people who really have control of the business. There are some good wealth managers at big firms, and in a way they do have control of their own businesses. A wealth manager at Goldman Sachs or UBS or Morgan Stanley lives or dies on how his accounts do. Although he’s affected by the amount of compensation he gets paid, by putting something into a portfolio, in the long run, he knows he’s got to perform, so his objectives are the same as the client’s. You want to have an identity between the wealth manager and the client.