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I purchased this book close to ten years ago before I finished college. I took a look at the table of contents and felt like crying because I didn't understand anything. Then I spent the next ten years working on my technical skills in finance, accounting, statistics, and corporate finance. I took the book off my bookshelf, dusted off the dust, and looked at the table of contents again. I am proud to say that after mastering the skills and working towards completing the CFA charter (currently Level 3 candidate), this book is amazing. The amazing thing about this book is that it teaches us how to calculate every single thing that has always been given to us in the textbooks as a given assumption. For instance, everyone knows the theory of efficient portfolios. In the CFA curriculum I spent lots of time studying all aspects of the theory. However, in every textbook I ever read all the real world assumptions were given to us as readers. In this book, the author teaches us how to calculate every data point. For example, relating to the efficient frontier, one would need to have a variance-covariance matrix. In all my years in the CFA and undegrad studies mastering corporate finance, the variance covariance matrix was always a given. This is the only book that actually taught me how to calculate every data point needed to run an entire optimization portfolio as a student, and on my own portfolio of stocks. The most abstract concepts in finance that undergraduate students take for granted in the textbook as given are all shown to us how to calculate. It teaches option pricing, linear programming for bond immunization strategies (which is extremely technical, advanced, and the realm of fixed income portfolio management for big insurance companies), basics of VBA, absolutely anything and everything that only the most passionate person would care to know how to calculate. I truly feel that I could literally raise a small fund with a very broad mandate, take the money, and just create different investment strategies by going through this book page by page. The author of this book is one of the highly regarded professors at Wharton Business School. I envy those lucky students that get to actually take his lecture and visit him during office hours. Finally, although I have read this entire book, I went ahead and purchased the new 3rd edition as well. I am giving this book as a gift to a very mathematical investor friend so he can enjoy its contents too in his investment strategies. And I am writing a new review for the 3rd edition as well. My review is but one of close to 200 positive reviews for this amazing book.
E-Book Content
Financial Modeling Financial Modeling, Second Edition Simon Benninga Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Financial Modeling Simon Benninga with a section on Visual Basic for Applications by Benjamin Czaczkes SECOND EDITION The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by an electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benninga, Simon, Financial modeling / Simon Benninga; with a section on Visual Basic for Applications by Benjamin Czaczkes. —2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-02482-9 1. Finance—Mathematical models. 2. Excel—Finance applications. 3. Microsoft Visual Basic for applications. I. Czaczkes, Benjamin. II. Title. HG173 .B46 2000 332.01'5118—dc21 00-035473 Dedication To our parents: Helen and Noach Benninga, Esther and Alfred Czaczkes
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Preface Financial Modeling, Second Edition Simon Benninga Copyright © 2000