Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I am a huge fan of this book for several reasons. First, I believe that Professor Holden is absolutely right in trying to move finance from a calculator driven study to spreadsheets. Everyone uses spreadsheets in their work, NOT calculators. So, it is not only useful to use spreadsheets, but to learn how to build them.
Another very nice thing about this book is that it uses plain vanilla Excel. You don't need any special add-ins. This allows the user to understand what Excel on its own is capable of (and that is quite a bit). It also means the student doesn't have to buy anything more than this book to get everything the author intended.
I also like the way he takes the student along. You build the first spreadsheet with the steps he provides, and then you modify that to make the second, and then the third, and so on. You get to see the increasingly powerful things one can do with Excel. The graphs he has one build also help because it allows you to change different values and immediately see how it changes the graph. This is immensely important in helping the student develop intuitions about how the changing of this or that number affects the topic of the spreadsheet.
This book on corporate finance begins with the time value of money, a basic concept, but one that seems to elude any number of people. Part 2 takes the student into the valuation of bonds and stocks. You also get to build a yield curve (very useful) and US yield curve dynamics. Part 3 is Capital Budgeting and this means Project Net Present Value (NPV), Cost-Reducing Project, Break-Even Analysis, Adjusted Present Value, Flows to Equity, and WACC.
Part 4 takes on topics of financial planning such as Corporate Financial Planning, the Du Pont System of Ratio Analysis, and Life-Cycle Financial Planning. The last part, Part 5 deals with options and corporate finance. You get to build spreadsheets for Binomial Option Pricing, Black Scholes Option Pricing, Debt and Equity Valuation, and Real Options.
While the book uses the Brigham text notation, the accompanying CD has several important chapters with the Brealy, Keown, Ross, and Van Horne notation systems. The CD also supplies databases and problems to solve using the spreadsheets. The author also has a website for additional info and updates.
Terrific book for finance classes or as a supplement to your own study.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Excel Modeling &_Estimation in Corporate Finance (2008 publication)
No comments:
Post a Comment