Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story
David Einhorn runs Greenlight Capital, and in 2002 he gave a public speech laying out what he saw as accounting and disclosure problems at Allied Capital, a public business development company. The years that followed included a leak investigation, a New York Times campaign against Einhorn personally, and a slow validation of his original thesis. This book is his detailed reconstruction of the entire episode, drawing on Allied's own filings, internal documents produced in litigation, and Einhorn's fund letters. It is unusually specific about how a short thesis is built and pressure-tested, and how a large public company can push back against a critic. Bill Ackman has cited it as required reading on both the analytical craft of shorting and the political costs that come with public activism, and the book is often assigned in investing seminars as a case study in the practical realities of dissent in public markets.
What you might want to know about Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
David Einhorn's blow-by-blow account of his multi-year short of Allied Capital and the retaliation he faced from the company, regulators, and the press.
Ackman has repeatedly cited Einhorn's book as one of the best case studies in short selling and public activism, and has said it captures the political and personal costs of taking a public position against a company better than any other volume on his shelf.
Some familiarity helps, but Einhorn walks through Allied's business in enough detail that a patient reader without a finance background can follow the argument.
Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story was written by David Einhorn, published in 2008 by Wiley.
Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
