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Fooling Some of the People All of the Time Updated and Revised: A Long Short Story |  | Author: David Einhorn
Creator: Joel Greenblatt
Publisher: Wiley
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.94
as of 11/24/2009 03:33 CST details
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New (31) Used (18) from $14.50
Seller: indoobestsellers
Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 18610
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 380
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0470073942
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.620973
EAN: 9780470073940
ASIN: 0470073942
Publication Date: May 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A rare look inside the world of activist hedge funds from one of this country's top investors In 2002, David Einhorn, the President of Greenlight Capital, gave a speech at a charity investment conference and was asked to share his best investment idea. He described his reasons why Greenlight had sold short the shares of Allied Capital, a leader in the private finance industry. What followed was a firestorm of controversy. Allied responded with a Washington, D.C. style spin-job-attacking Einhorn and disseminating half-truths and outright lies. Undeterred by the spin-job and lies, Greenlight continued its research after the speech and discovered Allied's behavior was far worse than Einhorn ever suspected. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time is the gripping chronicle of this saga, and this edition contains all new updates from the author. Page by page, it delves deep inside Wall Street, showing how the $6 billion hedge fund Greenlight Capital conducts its investment research and detailing the maneuvers of an unscrupulous company. Along the way, you'll witness feckless regulators, compromised politicians, and the barricades our capital markets have erected against exposing misconduct from important Wall Street customers. - Goes behind the scenes to detail the truth about investing, short selling, and the politics of business
- Shows the failings of Wall Street: its investment banks, analysts, journalists, and especially our government regulators
- Offers insights into the battles surrounding hedge funds
- Reveals the immense difficulties that prevent the government from sanctioning politically connected companies
At its most basic level, Allied Capital is the story of Wall Street at its worst. But the story is much bigger than one little-known company. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time is an important call for effective law enforcement, free speech, and fair play.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
 Fascinating--a must buy book! August 6, 2009
Ev Nucci
Rarely have I read a book and walked away feeling so much respect for an author. Einhorn could teach sell and buy side analysts the art of due diligence. Einhorn is a brilliant investor. He incenses the reader's expectations relative to justice, the red-letter relationship Allied had with the government and the imprudent, irresponsible and puerile actions by the government.
Einhorn's title is eloquent. It is easy to fool some of the people. All one need do is look to our most recent demise, 62 trillion credit default swaps?
 Hard to Evaluate - July 25, 2009
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Einhorn tells us that this is the story of a dishonest company called Allied Capital fooling its shareholders by paying lofty "dividends" partly based on a Ponzi-scheme using new capital contributions.
Einhorn also admits a conflict of interest - his firm has shorted Allied Capital, standing to gain from declines in the stock price. However, Einhorn has minimized that conflict by pledging any profits to charity from his firm's short position. Regardless, Einhorn believes that the bigger story herein is the indifferent attitude of regulators, auditors, and prosecutors.
The main value of "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time" is that it provides detailed insights into Einhorn's investment thinking. The book's downside is that it primarily consists of abstruse accounting analyses.
One of the best investment books I've ever read, if not the best June 8, 2009
XYZ
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Perhaps the only honest modern book on investments I have read. Also gives a limited insight into Einhorn's mind and way of thinking as an investor.
Einhorn masterfully tells the true tale of his battle against stock manipulation, corrupt and lax government, unscrupulous management, fee-hungry and conflict-laden investment banks, and careless and lazy long investors.
In the foreword, Greenblatt says something to the effect that he doesn't want his kids to read this book, because that will cause them to lose their innocence too soon. People should read this book for precisely that reason: to gain an appreciation for the sort of underhanded tactics that big business and the financial industry uses all of the time to part the little guys with their hard-earned money. And how the government often turns a blind eye (case in point Madoff, Stanford, Allied Capital, etc.)
Inside the Mind of an Exceptional Investor May 31, 2009
Justice Litle (Nevada)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Many well-respected money managers -- some of them with track records that spanned decades -- saw their reputations utterly destroyed in 2008. One manager who came through the carnage with reputation intact, and even enhanced, was David Einhorn (the author of this book). In addition to anticipating the fall of Lehman Brothers, Einhorn's fund, Greenlight Capital, significantly outperformed the S&P (though still ended up down on the year).
I am not an investor in Greenlight (Einhorn's fund), but I always enjoy reading their quarterly letters. They are consistently detailed, forthright and insightful, the way all investor communication should be.
I also give Einhorn respect (and admiration) for his 18th place finish in the 2006 World Series of Poker -- the $659,730 winings of which he donated to charity. The guy can clearly handle himself at a poker table.
The book itself was an interesting read on multiple levels. A friend of mine, who crunches spreadsheets in his sleep, made a friendly wager I wouldn't be able to get through the whole thing, as there is a great degree of detail (some would say mind-numbing detail) covering Allied Capital's various accounting irregularities.
I won the wager by devouring the book -- moreso out of hunger to absorb a highly trained investor's deeply analytical thought processes, than from a need to understand the particulars of Allied Capital or BDCs (business development companies).
The book sheds light on a number of excellent concepts above and beyond the Allied saga. The opening chapters, which describe the origins and philosophies and thought processes behind Greenlight Capital, are extremely informative.
The book as a whole, including all the Allied Capital detail, further offers a picture of what an exceptional investing mind looks like. If one were to try and reverse engineer the source of Einhorn's success (leaving out the irreducible good fortune component), four qualities would stand out:
- Exceptional analytical capability
- Exceptional creative ability
- Deep concentration ability
- Deep intestinal fortitude
To surpass "good" and make it to "great" as a trader or an investor, I would argue one needs all four traits. The presence of some but not all of these traits, I believe, accounts for the overwhelming tide of mediocre performance we see from Wall Street.
The typical investment banking path, for example, focuses heavily on the analytical side... while stomping the creative side into the dirt. The first few years of being an i-banker (if not one's entire career) are hallmarked by soul-crushingly repetitious activities that by and large replace spreadsheet gruntwork with any semblance of creative unconventional thought.
Worse still, the general institutional investment mindset runs directly counter to the "deep intestinal fortitude" idea -- in fact the whole of institutional investment culture seems expressly designed to browbeat the average manager into the mold of a gutless, benchmark-hugging coward, desperately afraid to deviate too far from the safety-approved track of his peers.
As if this were not enough, the mediocre types that hold the keys to most of the locks in the institutional investment world reinforce their plodding natures (and thus bolster their plodding dominance) with a "tried and true, proof in triplicate" way of thinking that drives the mavericks and creative thinkers mad (and out the door). At the end of the day, finding all four traits within a single individual becomes a rare thing indeed.
"Fooling" does have a touch of personal vendetta feel to it at times. The deep accounting detail can also be a bog in places, especially if one does not view keeping up with the myriad intricacies as an amusing challenge.
But the opening chapters alone are worth the price of admission... and if you want a gritty, true-to-life, wide-ranging gestalt feel for the combination of smarts and guts and tenacity it takes to successfully run a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time" delivers.
 Excellent Book March 23, 2009
Dino Christoforakis (Daytona Beach, FL USA)
This is an excellent book that gives you a view into the hedge fund world. Einhorn speaks in depth about proper valuation while criticizing the government agencies that are supposed to be regulated corporations.
While Einhorn does a superb job explaining his analysis, he does not complete the "long short-story" with the actual outcome. The reader much research further in order to determine the true outcome to his short sale of ALD.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 46
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