Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Craig W. Holden's "Excel Modeling in Investments" came as an excellent surprise to me when I received a faculty review copy from the publisher. I have long used Simon Benninga's competing text "Financial Modeling in Excel" to teach undergraduate and graduate financial modeling courses, however, I seriously am considering switching to Holden's EMinI. Holden correctly emphasizes discounting a bond's value on various yield curves, rather than a linear or fixed discount rate as in Benninga. Holden has some flaws, his layouts for binomial pricing models are inefficient for adapting to trinomial converging tree models, for example, but Holden is the only serious rival to Benninga in coverage of the major topics of modeling. Holden covers bonds, duration, convexity, portfolio optimization, financial planning, and the leading option pricing models. In addition, he covers cost of carry in the context of spot and futures prices, and interest rate parity. Holden does not cover Value at Risk, cheapest to deliver bonds, and has little on Visual Basic. However he does cover the Vasicek and Cox-Ingersoll-Ross interest rate models more thoroughly than Benninga. Holden's flaws are many: there is no index, and this is a text that cries out for one. Similarly, the footnotes are inadequate, and a broad "Further Reading" and bibliography should be here. Holden also suffers from being written as a companion text to popular finance textbooks such as Bodie Kane and Marcus, however, one always has the impression that the author was looking more to maximizing the market share of the text than really selecting the best chapters. We can only hope that Holden follows the better angels of his nature and includes more detail and chapters, perhaps on Monte Carlo simulation, VaR, and VBA programming. The CD-Rom, while helpful, is a little light, but this is the author's intention for he wishes students to build their own models from scratch.
In summary, I heartily recommend this book coupled with Benninga's more detailed "Financial Modeling in Excel" and find the practical emphasis indispensable for those working with or using a theoretical text such as Bodie Kane and Marcus. For those students that want careers in finance, this book is fundamental, primary, and necessary, for it emphasizes practical skills you will be executing everyday at a much higher level in a bank or asset management firm. Master these skills and models now before beginning your career and the acceleration of your promotions responsibilities will exceed those of your peers quickly.
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