Amazon.com
"Sold Short is the story of Manuel Asensio, a successful but controversial securities broker whose claim to fame is aggressive short selling--a widely disparaged (and sometimes wildly profitable) investment technique that realizes success only if stocks decline in value. Since the larger financial community is overwhelmingly comprised of long sellers who profit when prices rise, the shorts' contrarian position is always at odds and usually portrayed as an unscrupulous, backdoor attack on all things good and holy. Asensio sees it quite differently, of course, and with the help of Jack Barth, he reveals how a young boy who barely escaped Cuba before the revolution could come to be viewed as the devil incarnate by corporate honchos and Wall Street analysts whose professional paths he has crossed. After explaining how his firm uncovered some of their "grossly overvalued" companies, and what happened when he bet against them in the market, Asensio details the process so interested readers can theoretically profit from similar moves. Some of the material here is much too technical to interest casual investors, and Asensio's philosophy will still be scorned by those who don't abide it. Fellow shorts and those interested in all the machinations of the market, though, should find it an absorbing and informative read. --Howard Rothman"

Character is what you do when no one is looking, July 1, 2001
Reviewer: Eugene A Jewett from Alexandria, Va, United States
This book covers the anatomy of various stock promotions and it takes no prisoners. It implicates company managements', brokers, analysts, the financial press, the government regulators, the industry's self-regulators, and the corporate finance departments of all firms issuing stock to the public. It is dead-on accurate and a wonderful addition to the rich trove of books on Wall Street. Asensio provides an invaluable service to the public by going through the mechanics of short selling, street name stock, stock held in safe keeping, rule 504 Reg. D, Rule 144 and 145, accounting artifices, offshore rules and manipulations, and all the other techniques that shysters, and those who merely want to mislead you until times and circumstances improve, use. Too often you the investor end up as the sheep and the other guys have the shears and not so coincidentally your money.
If the SEC wanted to do something productive instead of engaging in its ponderous, bureaucratic, expensive, ham-handed approach to protecting small investors through policing capital markets, it should require that this book be sent at government expense to everyone who opens an account with a brokerage firm. It should also run ads in as many financial publications as possible so that the widest number of investors will have a chance to learn of its existence. The government wastes enormous amounts of money trying to find solutions to problems in a "trade-off of risks" world. Why not cut to the chase and opt for efficiency?

This little piggy went to market..., July 2, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from USA
"Starting around 1982, and continuing on through the 1990s, this little piggy went to market. That is to say, Americans invested more capital in the US stock markets, and more often than they had ever done so in the past. People dreamed of cashing in big time on the likes of technology companies that marketed products that the common man clearly did not understand; or telecommunications companies whose stock prices defied the physical laws of gravity; or energy companies, where more than half of the accounting (and auditing) was 'off the books'.
Fast forward to the year 2001, and market participants find themselves caught in the raging downdraft of a severe bear market. Gone are stock prices that are justified by some arcane measurement of productivity or valuation. Many of the highly touted companies of the 1990s find themselves at the doorstep of the bankruptcy court. Disgraced are the corporate leaders at those companies that knowingly chose to deceive their shareholders and the investing public by including sham numbers in their audited filings.
Yes, Americans made lots of money in the 1990s only to lose most of it in the 2000s."