Financial Modeling 3rd Edition, Simon Benninga

Too often, finance courses stop short of making a connection between textbook finance and the problems of real-world business. Financial Modeling bridges this gap between theory and practice by providing a nuts-and-bolts guide to solving common financial models with spreadsheets. Simon Benninga takes the reader step by step through each model, showing how it can be solved using Microsoft Excel. The long-awaited third edition of this standard text maintains the "cookbook" features and Excel dependence that have made the first and second editions so popular. It also offers significant new material, with new chapters covering such topics as bank valuation, the Black-Litterman approach to portfolio optimization, Monte Carlo methods and their applications to option pricing, and using array functions and formulas. Other chapters, including those on basic financial calculations, portfolio models, calculating the variance-covariance matrix,and generating random numbers, have been revised, with many offering substantially new and improved material. Other areas covered include financial statement modeling, leasing, standard portfolio problems, value at risk (VaR), real options, duration and immunization, and term structure modeling.

Technical chapters treat such topics as data tables, matrices, the Gauss-Seidel method, and tips for using Excel. The last section of the text covers the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) techniques needed for the book. The accompanying CD contains Excel worksheets and solutions to end-of-chapter exercises.

Simon Benninga's 3rd Edition of Financial Modelling with Excel is the single most useful book for finance students and professionals ever published and continues to offer an outstanding reference and textbook for students and practitioners of applied finance.

For further information, please use the "Look Inside" feature and examine the Table of Contents carefully, because I will emphasize selected portions.

It is difficult to overstate how useful and practical and helpful this work is for a wide audience and Financial Modelling is the single finance book I recommend for everyone after they have taken (or read themselves) Introductory Finance.

For those looking for "one-stop-shopping" for models that resemble those of professional financial analysts then there is no better value than Benninga's FM3.

Benninga's FM3 is a coal-face work for those who must make financial decisions using models. There are further specialist texts in topics covered here (credit modelling, portfolio construction, option pricing), but the models in FM3 are the first advanced models applied to loans, bonds, options, and equity portfolios. Master these and then specialized texts are easier to digest.

"Cookbook" metaphors are too strong and do not do this work justice, for Financial Modelling 3rd (FM3) is not a mere collection of recipes but rather topical introduction, explanation, and then direct technique.

If we can make a comparison with a "cookbook" then FM3 falls somewhere between "The Joy of Cooking" and "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." "Joy" combines chapters on technique, ingredients, and tools with dense pages of endless recipes, whereas "Mastering" emphasises technique and a few well-selected recipes.

The welcome new chapters cover bank valuation, the Black-Litterman approach to portfolio optimization, and Monte Carlo methods and applications to option pricing, and the previous 2nd edition's small chapter on using array functions and formulas has been expanded. The chapter on data downloads from YAHOO is also welcome, especially for those on a budget.

There is a single significant flaw in the work, which is excusable and redeemable. Far too often the discounting in the chapters is done over a flat interest rate curve. While the term structure of interest rates is covered, and historical term structures and parallel shifts and steepening and flattening is covered in isolation in a thorough chapter and with wonderful data files, the necessity and explicit connection of discounting from an appropriate yield curve is left implied and only mentioned in a few exercises. I would have preferred a "round up" chapter where each of the subjects treated (bond discounting, portfolio expected returns, options, etc.) under a yield curve with advanced models. Sure BLOOMBERG and REUTERS have these sort of things (often incorrectly) programmed, but students need to learn explicitly about them and do the exercise themselves to comprehend the importance of curve discounting.

The CD attached in the back of the book is alone worth the price, with over two score of models that are practical and adaptable for students and professionals alike. The files are stored and separated according to chapters and subject matter. Each file has logical progression of the concepts advanced in the book, and each separate sheet either stands alone or appropriately links to data and models on other sheets, so editing for your own purposes is a breeze.

For those who want to train themselves in Finance (not "personal finance") then I suggest reading Copeland, Weston, & Shastri's Financial Theory and Corporate Policy (4th Edition) and Brealey, Myers, and Marcus's "Corporate Finance" and "Investments" followed by working through FM3. Such a course would give any self-disciplined person the equivalent of a Masters of Science in Finance.

Product Details :
Hardcover: 1168 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press; third edition edition (January 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262026287
ISBN-13: 978-0262026284
Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.5 x 9 inches

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The AIG Story 1st Edition, Maurice R. Greenberg

Greenberg collaborates with Cunningham (Law/George Washington Univ.; Contracts in the Real World, 2012) to tell his side of the story of the incredible rise, and even more precipitous fall, of AIG, once the world's largest insurance company and the epicenter of one of the biggest bailouts ever. The authors divide their account into two parts separated by Greenberg's resignation from his leadership positions in the company in early 2005 as a result of an orchestrated press campaign organized by then-crusading N.Y. State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whose own subsequent downfall was even more complete than that of AIG, which, in this presentation, he had worked so assiduously to destroy. The authors claim that what led to the 2008 bailout was the incompetence of the leadership that took over after Greenberg quit. His replacements are said to have lost sight of the significance of the risks incurred by the financial derivatives unit responsible for the credit-default swap business, the collapse of which forced the government's hand. Few of Greenberg's identified opponents, including AIG's outside directors, the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, and employees of the state's attorney general's office, emerge with their reputations intact. Only now is the company emerging from government ownership, and the authors examine Greenberg's career building the biggest insurance company in the world. A Korean War veteran, Greenberg brought Western insurance products to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, helped open China to Western finance, and provided indispensable, sometimes covert, services to the U.S. government. A useful contribution to the ongoing shaping of the story of the recent financial crisis.

Did the U.S. government break the law when it seized control of American International Group during the financial crisis of 2008? In 'The AIG Story,' the man who built the giant insurer says that the answer is yes and explains his reasoning. Former AIG chief executive Maurice R. 'Hank' Greenberg—along with his co-author, Lawrence A. Cunningham—also offers a fascinating company history and an account of how, after Mr. Greenberg’s ouster in 2005, AIG made the disastrous mortgage bets that drove it into the arms of the feds.

[A] strong, fast-moving and well-crafted book...In effect, there are two stories here, both well told: the first, the story of a man who dreamed the American dream and realized it through drive, determination, and adherence to principle; and the second, the story of what seems to be an evolving model, with government officials, always for political reasons, exercising what increasingly approaches operational control over American business. It’s to the great credit of Greenberg that he’s never accepted the validity of the second and has devoted his life and great energies to keeping the first alive and well.

Product Details :
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 29, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118345878
ISBN-13: 978-1118345870
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.1 inches

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QuickBooks 2013 The Guide 1st Edition, Leslie Capachietti

Set up and maintain a complete, efficient small business financial management system with ease! QuickBooks 2013: The Guide is filled with best practices for handling essential business tasks and customizing QuickBooks for the way you work.

Written by an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor with years of experience supporting and training QuickBooks users, this practical resource shows you, step by step, how to use the software to control your businesses finances, process invoices, track inventory, and manage payroll. Get the most from the software and run your small business smoothly and effectively using the proven techniques and time-saving tips inside this authoritative guide to QuickBooks 2013.

This is the "go-to guide" for QuickBooks users of all levels. I am a CPA and have been using QuickBooks for 20 years. I have learned so many more efficient ways of using QuickBooks by reading this guide, and I will pass these along to my staff. I am planning a QuickBooks training course in the country of Belize in December 2012 and I will be using Leslie's guide as a training tool. From the beginner to the advanced user of QuickBooks, this is THE manual to keep on your desk.

Product Details :
Paperback: 640 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1 edition (October 30, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0071809341
ISBN-13: 978-0071809344
Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.4 x 9.1 inches

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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order 1st Edition, Benn Steil

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.

Upending the conventional wisdom that Bretton Woods was the product of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil shows that it was in reality part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda hatched within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and aimed at eliminating Britain as an economic and political rival. At the heart of the drama were the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to bear new and striking archival evidence, Steil offers the most compelling portrait yet of the complex and controversial figure of White--the architect of the dollar's privileged place in the Bretton Woods monetary system, who also, very privately, admired Soviet economic planning and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officials and agents over many years.

A remarkably deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn, The Battle of Bretton Woods is destined to become a classic of economic and political history.

Benn Steil is an exceptional scholar hailing from the Council on Foreign Relations. I approached this book with high expectations and was not disappointed. If I had a buck for every blog, article, or interview referring to the Bretton Woods conference, dollar hegemony, the gold standard, and related monetary matters I could stop reading stuff like this because I would be rich. I surmise, however, that not one in 100 understand what really happened. I do not know if this is THE definitive work on the Bretton Woods conference but it certainly is a definitive treatise. Those who love quotes will burn through a few highlighters. (I did.) The intense discussions--snarky attacks and counterattacks by the combatants--are relayed in detail and in living color. Steil successfully takes you back to the events as though you were there. Minor warning: You do not need to be a wonk to love this book, but you must have some appreciation for wonky. It is not dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Currency jocks will love the detailed descriptions of the battles over fixed exchange rates, adjustable exchange rates, free trade, dollar hegemony, and the role of gold in this new era.

Steil's discussion can be crudely described in three parts: (1) the decades leading up to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference; (2) the actual conference in which the next 50 years of currency exhanges and global trading rules would be mapped out; and (3) the consequences to the post-war world. The conference stemmed from a few astute players who realized that the world could fall into chaos if plans were not made in advance to establish a global currency regime and rules of global trade--a New World Order. This is that story and the subplots that bring life to the historically profound period.

At stake was a power struggle between the British and the US to establish post war dominance. My preconceived (and decidedly incorrect) notion of WWII was naively simple: the Brits got in a pan-European brawl; the isolationist-prone US sent massive military weaponry and aid via the Lend-Lease program to their strong ally; with Pearl Harbor as a proximate trigger, we entered the war. In reality, the Americans and the British were in a battle royale. The British were trying to establish an aid arrangement that would leave them strong enough to recover some of their imperial splendor after the war. The Americans placed extremely stringent demands on the so-called Lend-Lease program with the explicit intention of leaving the British economically prostrate to ensure American hegemony. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about the alliance. The Battle of Bretton Woods was indeed a battle spanning a number of years, and it got very ugly.

A large portion of the fight was by proxy through two critical figures. Economist John Maynard Keynes, one of the most prominent intellects of the 20th century (whether you like his economic theories or not, which I don't) squared off against Harry Dexter White, a determined yet highly enigmatic American. These two guys were attempting to determine the fate of the global economy through a war of wits and fierce negotions over three years preceeding the conference and at the conference with representatives from dozens of nations. At the conclusion of the conference, each was forced to turn their ample skill to beat back fierce resistance with their respective political elites back home to sell the agreements. It was arguably a fight to the death: both White and Keynes died of heart attacks soon thereafter. One could legitimately argue the Battle killed them.

My image of and respect for Keynes evolved enormously, not as an economist but rather as an unlikely diplomat. He was cantankerous to a fault, but he somehow found a way to compromise when necessary to optimize an otherwise very weak position for Britain and, most importantly, help seal an historically profound agreement. Harry Dexter White's character is confounding and enigmatic. He displayed an unorthodox desire for a strong post-war Russian-Soviet alliance. His pro-Soviet stance is a fascinating sub-plot that only begins to clarify in the post war (cold war) period.

The detailed analysis up to the mid 1950s gives way to a relatively brief synopsis in which Steil races us through the next half century briskly. This final portion, most of which is contained in the Epilogue, is filled with subject matter popular in the blogosphere that I had read many, many times. Steil takes us through deGaulle demanding gold, Nixon taking us off the last residue of the gold standard, the dollar's impact as the reserve currency, and central bankers aggressively fiddling with monetary policy. There was, however, a difference between this post-war synopsis and the reading the blogs: I understood it in a much deeper, contextually accurate way. I've finally got it; I understand our roots. Does it leave me more sanguine about current monetary policies and about the future? Not in the slightest.

Product Details :
Hardcover: 472 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 24, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691149097
ISBN-13: 978-0691149097
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches

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Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service 1st Edition, Ken Blanchard

"Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn't good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans."

This, in a nutshell, is the advice given to a new Area Manager on his first day—in an extraordinary business book that will help everyone, in every kind of organization or business, deliver stunning customer service and achieve miraculous bottom-line results.

Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature—not just another program of the month.

America is in the midst of a service crisis that has left a wake of disillusioned customers from coast to coast. Raving Fans includes startling new tips and innovative techniques that can help anyone create a revolution in any workplace—and turn their customers into raving, spending fans.

Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager by its co-author, Raving Fans uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make stunning customer service a constant feature -- not just another program of the month.

Product Details :
Hardcover: 137 pages
Publisher: William Morrow; 1 edition (May 19, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0688123163
ISBN-13: 978-0688123161
Product Dimensions: 0.2 x 0.7 x 0.2 inches

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Financial Management: Theory & Practice (with Thomson ONE - Business School Edition 1-Year Printed Access Card) 13th Edition, Eugene F. Brigham

Give future and current managers a thorough understanding of the financial theory that is essential for developing and implementing effective financial strategies in business today. Brigham/Ehrhardt's leading FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: THEORY AND PRACTICE, 13E is the only text that strikes a perfect balance between solid financial theory and practical applications. Readers gain a strong working knowledge of today's changed financial environment as this edition examines recent financial crises, the global economic crisis, and role of finance in the business and students' personal lives. This book's relevant presentation, numerous examples and emphasis on using Excel spreadsheets shows readers how to increase the value of a firm. Integrated practice using Thomson ONE-Business School Edition gives readers hands-on experience using the same research tool Wall Street professionals rely upon daily. This book is both the ideal choice for today's introductory MBA course as well as a valuable reference tool for students throughout their academic and business careers.

Professional power of Thomson ONE - Business School Edition lets students work with actual financial tools.
Now students can complete financial research and analysis using the same tool that professional brokers and Wall Street analysts trust every day--Thomson ONE - Business School Edition online database. Educators and students have instant access to leading financial data sources, including Thomson Financial, Worldscope, SEC Disclosure, First Call, Datastream and more. Corresponding Thomson ONE problems in most chapters in the text enable valuable practice.

End-of-chapter spreadsheet problems guide students through building a model.
Partially completed, end-of-chapter spreadsheets contain financial data and instructions on how to "build a model." This structure guides the student through the problem, minimizes unnecessary typing and data entry, and makes it easy to grade the work because all student answers appear in the same location on the spreadsheet.

Unmatched author expertise ensures a clear, contemporary approach.
This premier authorship team combines the extensive teaching background and more than 30 years of text writing experience of Dr. Gene Brigham with the contemporary scholarship and practical, professional expertise of Dr. Mike Ehrhardt. Together, these authors deliver a consistent, accurate, and innovative approach that will keep students first in finance.

Practical application of theory and trends highlights the role of finance today.
The authors clearly illustrate the application of concepts and theories throughout the book's proven presentation, wealth of actual business examples, thought-provoking problem sets, and integrated mini-cases. Comprehensive mini-cases at the end of each chapter further demonstrate applications with corresponding PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets as well as solutions on the Instructor's password-protected website.

A multidisciplinary approach demonstrates how finance affects all areas of business.
The authors interweave various subjects throughout the text discussion to clearly demonstrate how business impacts finance and how all areas of business are affected by finance.

Early coverage of financial statements establishes a strong context for the concepts that follow.
Presenting financial statements early within the text provides a clear picture of what financial management is all about. Students understand how the effects of financial decisions are shared throughout the firm. Early introductions to risk analysis, discounted cash flow techniques, valuation procedures, and EVA/MVA allows the authors to use and reinforce these key concepts throughout the book.

Product Details :
Hardcover: 1184 pages
Publisher: South-Western College Pub; 13 edition (March 3, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1439078092
ISBN-13: 978-1439078099
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 1.5 x 10.3 inches

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