No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller

This is Harry Markopolos's account of his nine-year attempt to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard Madoff was running a fraud, published under a subtitle variant of the same work. The reference holds two entries for this title and the content described here is the same book.

Markopolos, an options analyst in Boston, was asked by his employer to reverse-engineer Madoff's returns and concluded within hours that the claimed split-strike conversion strategy could not generate them. He documents the analytical basis: the near-absence of correlation with equity markets, the options open interest that was too small to support the hedging the strategy required, the implausibly smooth return series, and the tiny audit firm. He describes submitting his analysis to the regulator repeatedly from 2000 onward and receiving no substantive response, and he describes the personal effect of holding the conclusion for nearly a decade.

The book is angry and self-dramatising in places, and Markopolos attributes the regulatory failure largely to incompetence rather than to institutional design. His testimony to Congress in February 2009 and this book contributed to reforms in how the Securities and Exchange Commission handles tips and to the creation of its whistleblower programme. As with the other entry for this work, readers wanting the fraud's full history should turn to Diana Henriques.