Wirecard – The “German Enron”, and a personal history
> Lessons to be learned<p>* even a pretty obvious fraud can go on much longer than one would think if the organizers are ruthless enough. My original short position would have gone against me 25x over 12 years and the share price even after today’s disaster would be higher than back in 2008 (just to be clear: the company is worth ZERO in my opinion)<p>* a company that goes against people who write negative articles as aggressively as Wirecard has something to hide<p>* if the profitability of a business can not be explained by its business model, then most likely something is very wrong (greetings Bernie Madoff)<p>* 99% of professional investors and analysts don’t care about these things even if you tell them. A lot of people knew that the company was fishy but hey thought they can make money anyway and a lot of people made a lot of money over the years<p>* Small companies with far flung operations in difficult geographies should be avoided (see Globo Plc) as this makes fraud difficult to detect for auditors<p>* A big 4 Audit firm is no proof of quality.