( 11 reviews )
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Aug 12 2009
Financial Shenanigans is not a quick read. But, it elevates an investor to a completely different level. Warren Buffett said Rule No. 1: Never lose money, Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No 1. If you are serious about investing, and most importantly, protecting yourself from losing a lot of money, you need to read this book because it teaches you what managers can do to fool investors by playing the financial numbers game. - Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market
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Posted: Apr 1 2009
This is a great summary of the most-used tricks to sliding around in the gray areas of GAAP accounting in the US. These specific techniques likely represent 80% or more of the different tricks used from 1990-2007 by large corporations to manipulate their earnings and other performance, one of the main benefits of which is increasing their stock price. If the book was used by rank and file investors to look in detail at annual reports of their portfolio companies, they'd have a good early warning signal for the typical practices. And it includes sometimes shocking but always interesting true case studies of these techniques. A drawback might be that it is dated or does not include some more sophisticated techniques.
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( 0 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jul 5 2008
As a college-level lecturer in Forensic Accounting, I seriously considered using this book, but decided not to. While it is clearly the most readable book in the area of forensic accounting, it is lean on examples and does not include citations to the cases and other materials it describes. A far better, though more difficult, book on the narrow subject of financial fraud is The Financial Numbers Game: Detecting Creative Accounting Practices and a better book on Forensic Accounting generally is Forensic and Investigative Accounting (Third Edition). In any event, you'll be better off avoiding Fraud Examination (with ACL CD-ROM), which spends most of its time (i.e., your time) moralizing and psychoanalyzing those who commit fraud.
