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strawsub 's review for:
4-stars in comparison to books of the same genre.
Let's start with the reason why I picked up this book. So I took an introductory accounting class at university and the lecturer captured my interest in the act of investigating the financial statements to identify problems. After a quick search on Google, this book and Financial Shenanigans came up.
'Fooling Some of the People All of the Time' follows Einhorn in his quest to uncover the blatant but deliberately ignored fraud at Allied Capital. The narrative follows a pattern of Einhorn (or one of his friends) spotting evidence of fraud, raising the issue to investors and watchdogs, getting ignored (or counterattacked) and try again with more evidence. In the first quarter or so, this narrative is intriguing but it gets less so later (I'll have to confess, I only finished ~90% of this book).
It gives me great satisfaction after (nearly) completing the book since I can now understand what the title means. It encapsulates the idea that fraud is actually not that hard to uncover, the main issue is that after uncovering, some people will actively choose to ignore it. Hence, a group of people will always be fooled, just because they wanted to.
Did I sometimes fall asleep reading this book? Yes.
Did I choose to major in Finance and Accounting to become better at scrutinising financial statements because of this book? Yes.
Let's start with the reason why I picked up this book. So I took an introductory accounting class at university and the lecturer captured my interest in the act of investigating the financial statements to identify problems. After a quick search on Google, this book and Financial Shenanigans came up.
'Fooling Some of the People All of the Time' follows Einhorn in his quest to uncover the blatant but deliberately ignored fraud at Allied Capital. The narrative follows a pattern of Einhorn (or one of his friends) spotting evidence of fraud, raising the issue to investors and watchdogs, getting ignored (or counterattacked) and try again with more evidence. In the first quarter or so, this narrative is intriguing but it gets less so later (I'll have to confess, I only finished ~90% of this book).
It gives me great satisfaction after (nearly) completing the book since I can now understand what the title means. It encapsulates the idea that fraud is actually not that hard to uncover, the main issue is that after uncovering, some people will actively choose to ignore it. Hence, a group of people will always be fooled, just because they wanted to.
Did I sometimes fall asleep reading this book? Yes.
Did I choose to major in Finance and Accounting to become better at scrutinising financial statements because of this book? Yes.