A successful fund manager and former academic once told me that business school research is focused too much on topics that get professors published and promoted and too little on explaining how markets actually work. This was not an entirely facetious remark. He was referring to what he perceived to be a fundamental disconnect between the objectives of mainstream business school curricula…
Who wants to be an average investor? We all dream of beating the market and being super investors, and we spend an inordinate amount of time and resources in this endeavor. Consequently, we are easy prey for the magic bullets and the secret formulas offered by salespeople pushing their wares. In spite of our best efforts, though, most of us fail in our attempts to be more than average. Non…
Financial management continues to change at a rapid pace. Advancements are occurring not only in the theory of financial management but also in its real-world practice. One result has been for financial management to take on a greater strategic focus, as managers struggle to create value within a corporate setting. In the process of value creation, financial managers are increasingly supple…
The FRM Handbook provides the core body of knowledge for financial risk managers. Risk management has rapidly evolved over the last decade and has become an indispensable function in many institutions. This Handbook was originally written to provide support for candidates taking the FRM examination administered by GARP. As such, it reviews a wide variety of practical topics in a consistent a…
Financial Risk Management started as one thing and has ended as another. I took up this project with the primary aim of making risk measurement and management techniques accessible, by working through simple examples, and explaining some of the real-life detail of financing positions. I had gotten fairly far along with it when the subprime crisis began and the world changed. I had alrea…
Most accounting textbooks are written to teach accounting to future accountants, the creators of financial statements. This book is intended to explain financial accounting to company managers and investors, the users of financial statements. As a result, this book will give an intuitive understanding of the accounting process and standard accounting reports. This text does not focus on ac…
The past three decades have been a remarkable period for innovation. This is no less true, and probably truer, for financial innovation. No prior period of equal length has ever witnessed anything that even comes close. This innovation has included amazing advances in financial theory, computational capability, new product design, new trading processes, new markets, and new applications. I…
One of the most important investment decisions that an investor encounters is the allocation of funds among the wide range of financial instruments. That decision requires an understanding of the investment characteristics of all asset classes. The objective of The Handbook of Financial Instruments is to explain financial instruments and their characteristics. In Chapter 1, financial as…
When the three of us decided to write a book, we were united by one strongly held principle: Corporate finance should be developed in terms of a few integrated, powerful ideas. We believed that the subject was all too often presented as a collection of loosely related topics, unified primarily by virtue of being bound together in one book, and we thought there must be a better way. One thing we…
Why should you buy this book? There are certainly others to choose from, each with a viewpoint that reflects the author’s background and opinions. Why this one? Why this particular author’s background and opinions? The answer is communication: this book is in a sense a communication manual for non-financial managers. I believe there is a great need for better communication between financ…
Antonio’s first big mistake in The Merchant of Venice was to bet his whole fortune on a fleet of ships; his second was to borrow 3,000 ducats from a single source. The first rule of risk management is to identify your risk. The second is to diversify it. Antonio broke the second rule, and his creditor Shylock flunked the first. He found he could not take his pound of Antonio’s flesh withou…
WE WERE MOTIVATED TO WRITE THIS TEXTBOOK BY A CENTRAL insight: The core concepts in finance are simple and intuitive. What makes the subject challenging is that it is often difficult for a novice to distinguish between these core ideas and other intuitively appealing approaches that, if used in financial decision making, will lead to incorrect decisions. De-emphasizing the core concepts that un…
We are very pleased with the success of the first edition of the book. It has encouraged us to retain the approach in order to explain corporate finance to students and professionals. There are four key features that distinguish this book from the many other corporate finance text books available on the market today: • Our strong belief that financial analysis is part of corporate finance…
The teaching and the practicing of corporate finance are more challenging and exciting than ever before. The last decade has seen fundamental changes in financial markets and financial instruments. In the early years of the 21st century, we still see announcements in the financial press about such matters as takeovers, junk bonds, financial restructuring, initial public offerings, bankruptc…
Finance is a rapidly expanding field of science, with a rather unique link to applications. Correspondingly, recent years have witnessed the growing role of financial engineering in market rooms. The possibility of easily accessing and processing huge quantities of data on financial markets opens the path to new methodologies, where systematic comparison between theories and real data not o…
Abstract. Despite rapid branch expansion, priority sector lending norms and thrust on pro-poor and rural credit schemes, in the post-nationalization period, a vast segment of the population, particularly the poor and disadvantaged, did not have access to the existing financial institutions. There were serious aberrations in the credit delivery mechanism and schemes. An earnest search was made …
Abstract. During the past two decades, India has been acclaimed as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But the pace of growth is not reflected in the expansion of employment opportunities, especially in rural areas. Vast majority of labour force in rural areas are concentrated in agriculture and other low productive activities. The kind of diversification in rural employment wit…
Abstract. The present paper shows the discussion and results of the research that simulated the fluctuation of the US Consumer Credit (CONS) using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The research had several objectives, like: building, training and using an ANN as a possible tool for decision making, through the simulation of the US Consumer Credit. The condition for a successful training of t…
Abstract. The analysis of monetary policy impact - via interest rate as instrument of intervention - on the evolution of stock market prices has gained more popularity during the current crisis due to the accumulation of financial imbalances. This article investigates the impact of monetary policy on equity indexes in European Union countries from January 2000 to February 2012, using cointe…
Abstract. The current economic context, characterized by strong slippages, at the real and financial flows, request, in order to maintain stability and favorable evolution of the enterprise, a fair and efficient substantiation of the decision process. Such need is found, especially, in the area of corporate finance. In this respect, managers must be given tools used in assessing the adequac…
This report presents some reflections on and experiences from a cross-national qualitative research project about within-household finances conducted by sociologists from Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. The authors focus first on the challenges of making qualitative cross-national comparisons and argue for the importance of establishing a common understanding of methodological an…