Reddit reviews Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports, 3rd Edition

• The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Security Analysis - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• The Interpretation of Financial Statements - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports - Howard Schilit
  
  
• Applied Value Investing - Joseph Calandro
  
  
• Analysis for Financial Management - Robert Higgins
  
  
• Margin of Safety - Seth Klarman
  
  
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings - Philip Fisher
  
  
• One Up On Wall Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• Beating The Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• The Essays of Warren Buffett - Warren Buffett
  
  
• Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life - Alice Schroeder
  
  
• Buffett Beyond Value - Prem Jain
  
  
• Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• You Can Be A Stock Market Genius - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Little Book That Beats The Market - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Big Secret for the Small Investor: A New Route to Long-Term Investment Success - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Leferve
  
  
• Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger
  
  
• Rediscovered Benjamin Graham - Janet Lowe
  
  
• The Theory of Investment Value - John Burr Williams
  
  
• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger - Peter Bevelin
  
  
• Security Analysis and Business Valuation on Wall Street - Jeffrey Hooke
  
  
• Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment - James Montier
  
  
• Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• The Dark Side of Valuation - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports - Thomas Ittelson
  
  
• Buyout - Rick Rickertsen
  
  
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini
  
  
• Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics - Gary Belsky
  
  
• The Warren Buffett Way - Robert Hagstrom
  
  
• The Most Important Thing - Howard Marks
  
  
• Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• Accounting For Value - Stephen Penman
  
  
• Distressed Debt Analysis - Stephen Moyer
  
  
• Bankruptcy Investing - Ben Branch
  
  
• The Vulture Investors - Hilary Rosenberg
  
  
• Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring - Stuart Gilson
  
  
• Distress Investing - Martin J Whitman
  
  
• The Aggressive Conservative Investor - Martin J Whitman

Honestly, the book I most often introduce would be this: Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports, Third Edition

Great introduction into the workings of earnings management in its various forms, with real world case studies to show how it was performed.

https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Accounting-Gimmicks-Reports/dp/0071703071

If you want to read about manipulating statements.

Not exactly accounting per sé, but check out Financial Shenanigans.

Maybe this one?

https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Accounting-Gimmicks-Reports/dp/0071703071

Best way is to compare free cash flow to net income: FCF (OCF - CapEx) should the majority of the time (but not every single year) be greater than net income. If NI is routinely greater than FCF, than it's a pretty good indicator something is not right. There are other tricks, I recommend this and especially THIS if you want to read up more about "quality of earnings" detection.

http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Accounting-Gimmicks-Reports/dp/0071703071/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=12KFCM4ENBFTQ61T2D2V

That's a more modern version. A lot of the recent financial shenanigans have changed a bit. They typically involved mark to market scams (Enron), repo (Lehman used Repo 105) to falsify the balance sheets, or surprise earnings (Overstock).

Antar's blog is really good, too.

http://whitecollarfraud.blogspot.com/

That said, I've never seen the Hollywood type of accounting anywhere else. It's incredibly bizarre. The Guardian article w/Eddie Murphy is the only one I've seen that discusses it openly.

https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Accounting-Gimmicks-Reports/dp/0071703071

Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports, 3rd Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071703071/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Fg6KDbNWCWPRP

Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports

link

I'm reading this book https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Accounting-Gimmicks-Reports/dp/0071703071

Still early in the book. One thing that stood out was too good to believe revenue growth as compared to similar companies during a set time period. e.g Enron