Fooling Some of the People All of the Time
Einhorn's years-long battle with Allied Capital — a company he publicly shorted while alleging accounting fraud. A short-selling masterclass and searing indictment of regulatory failure. The punchline: being right isn't enough when the institutional framework is working against you. Einhorn presented evidence of fraud at a public conference, the stock went up, and the SEC investigated Einhorn.
The book’s middle stretch, a hundred-plus pages of asset-by-asset, loan-by-loan detail pulled straight from Allied Capital’s filings, is where multiple reviewers say they started skimming. One reader asks flatly, “what is the purpose of reading an extremely detailed account,” and another admits “the book is a bit of a drag.” Because Einhorn is protagonist, prosecutor, and narrator of his own fight, readers flag the account as one-sided, wishing a journalist had checked his version instead of taking the short-seller’s word for the scale of the fraud: “his narrative was highly biased to the point that it irritated me.” The same core allegations against Allied Capital get restated chapter after chapter as new evidence piles on, which reads as padding rather than escalation, and the back half turns into a point-by-point rebuttal exercise instead of forward motion.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
