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| Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story | 
 enlarge | Author: David Einhorn
Creator: Joel Greenblatt
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.56
You Save: $13.39 (45%)
New (30) Used (8) from $15.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 761
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 380
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
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
A rare look inside the world of hedge funds from one of this country’s top investors David Einhorn is one of the investment community’s fastest rising stars. He founded his hedge fund, Greenlight Capital, at the age of 27, and now has $5 billion under management. In Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, Einhorn offers readers insights into the battles surrounding hedge funds. In 2002, Einhorn spoke publicly about Allied Capital–a leader in the private finance industry–presenting it as an excellent short opportunity. This book will describe the incredible events that followed Einhorn’s speech and how Allied and the investment community attacked him to protect the company–and its stock price. Informative and intriguing, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time details how the current environment on Wall Street not only allows for such behavior, but how it protects the companies and attacks those who attempt to uncover them.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Among the best investment books I've ever read April 25, 2008
40 out of 59 found this review helpful
David Einhorn's new book about his long-running battle with Allied Capital is an amazing book. More than just an investing book, it's an investing novel, with good guys and bad guys and clueless, gullible and conflicted investors, regulators, Wall St. "analysts" and media. I stayed up all night to read it.
The review by George Anders in the Wall St. Journal recently missed the point. Anders focused on Einhorn, highlighting his tremendous track record and saying he's gutty, tenacious, patient and disciplined, but that's not the story! The real story is what Allied Capital has done and the utter failure of regulators, investors and the media to do anything about it. I don't see how it's possible to read this book and not come to the conclusion that this company has done -- and continues to do -- all sorts of terrible things, but rather than expressing an opinion on this, Anders makes it seem like a he-said-she-said tempest in a teapot and, reading between the lines, seems to be saying that because the stock hasn't plunged, that Einhorn's investment thesis has been proven wrong. It hasn't -- but it can sometimes take many years.
(Full disclosure: Funds I manage are short the stock of Allied Capital and I'm mentioned briefly in the book.)
 Allied's Hefty Dividend Checks Have Cleared For Over 40 Years May 5, 2008
29 out of 84 found this review helpful
Einhorn is not alone in believing that financial statements are sometimes a form of creative writing. But dividends are not; when a dividend check successfully clears, there can be absolutely no doubt that the money really was in the bank. And given that Allied Capital not only pays a hefty dividend but has also defended and increased its hefty dividend for more than four decades, it is simply silly to mount the kind of bear raids that Einhorn has repeatedly mounted on Allied Capital during the last decade. All he has done has been to make it possible for savvy investors to get pieces of a very successful enterprise at bargain prices.
A great book and a must read for anyone interested in investing May 6, 2008
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
I was lucky enough to get a hold of an advance copy of the book from Amazon. Couldn't put it down. Finished it and went out and bought one for everyone at our company. Then went and bought more over the weekend to hand out to folks. It is an absolutely terrific book, and thank you, David Einhorn, for writing it. I loved the first few chapters on Greenlight and was absolutely mesmerized by the rest. One of my colleagues has gotten about half way through and said he did not realize that folks could "not get it" when faced with compelling evidence. I told him to read on, and that his disbelief will get much worse. I think that it is a stunning example of the concept of cognitive dissonance (at best, and probably being very kind with that). Writing this book took a great deal of courage and I know I am a better investor for having read it.
 Detailed insight into both a hedge fund and a loan company's abuse of the system May 13, 2008
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
The book is really close to being 2 or 3 books in one. Initially heard about the book in the WSJ, I pre-ordered it on Amazon and took a few weeks to read.
In the first part Mr. Einhorn writes several chapters aimed at a non-professional investor to build the background of how a hedge fund invests, building the reader's knowledge from zero to fluent enough to understand the book. There's a glossary in the back of the book to refer to if you forget any of the terms. In fact, later on Mr. Einhorn's open and full disclosure of his investing philosophy, technique, and results contrast with those of Allied Capital and its collection of LLCs.
The second part of the book builds from a small trickle to a river of fraud, and frankly this is the hardest part to get through. You're directed to watch Mr. Einhorn's speech on the web in order to understand a dissection of reactions that follow, and I admit that I felt as if I was reading a story from somebody who was picked on too much in the schoolyard and is taking revenge by writing a book. As I kept reading the chapters the story suddenly took me by surprise (around P.200 or so).
It then becomes a story of how, if you were to implement a business poorly and needed to keep it going no matter what, you would do whatever it took to keep paying a dividend to keep your stock from tanking. You might start by fibbing on the health of the business one year, sell healthy companies to hide your true results a few years later, and start directing campaign donations to the right parties a few years later. In for a penny, in for a pound. Mr. Einhorn didn't mention, but in years past I have read, that Enron kept going for so long because they did a good job spreading their money around to both the politicians and the local community. Mr. Einhorn does mention how much many parts of the US (Wall Street, the various parts of government, and mom-and-pop investors) want to continue the company so as not to lose whatever interest they have vested into the company or system.
In the end I feel educated about his hedge fund, I feel in over my head on how to value a company's investments if the company is similar to Allied Capital, I feel a bit angry on how narrow the scope and small the punishment delivered (but not surprised - I've seen how narrow the scope of investigations of companies are before), and I feel that Mr. Einhorn has, for lack of a more subtle way of putting it, wasted enough of his life worrying about this company. You're not going to get back the years you've spent. You should go on to enjoy something else in life (but I appreciate the sacrifice you made so I could read about this in a book).
A Scary Read. A Warning to America. An Excellent Book. May 4, 2008
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
Ever wonder how the Internet bubble REALLY formed? How Enron got away with fraud for so long? Do you think that the truth always comes out eventually? And that the good guys win in the end?
Read this book and see how even the free American economy can't handle bad news about its companies. How companies are able to hide the truth from investors and how some on Wall Street and even the government end up helping them out.
This true story is Kafkaesque. The writing is easy to understand. And the ending is a wakeup call.
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