Financial Modeling - 2nd Edition
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List Price: $75.00 Amazon.com Price: $75.00 
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Product Details
- Media: Hardcover
- Publisher: MIT Press (18 September, 2000)
- ISBN: 0262024829
- Average Customer Review:
Based on 34 reviews.
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Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3,151
Customer Reviews
Excellent book due to its simple practicalityI highly recommend this book to any aspiring financial analyst. It is definitely worth it, even at the list price.
Want to master the fundamentals of basic finance using Excel? then this is one of the few books on the market that really meet this need. Want to set up more advanced mathmatics modeling? well as the introduction of this explains, this book is more like a cookbook: it lists the required basic ingredients and the culinary process but if you want to spice the dish (financial model) up, it is up to the individuals to dig out those advanced formulas from the financial trade journals and apply them to the models.
I first saw the first edition of this book in my college library. took it home and was EXCITED. I was looking for a practical book that would show me the intricacies of Excel for setting up financial models and this was like a god-sent. Like one of the other reviewers said, this book combined basic finance, Excel functions, and VBA programming. To add practicality to this book, Professor Benninga even showed how to download financial data from the internet. Granted it is rather basic, but it adds to the usability of his book, making it a well-round book.
The best parts are end-of-the chapter exercises. Solutions are provided in the accompanying CD-ROM. See how many ways can you solve the same problem.
Professor Benninga always outlines the assumptions and explains the parameters of each model. We should remember that in many instances, unrealistic assumptions lead to way-of-the mark numbers, rendering the whole modeling process and its calculations useless.
Want to become a advanced-level financial modeler? then master the fundamentals first! this book gets you started.
P.S. I also highly recommend to anyone just starting with Excel modeling to read William J. Orvis's Excel for Scientists and Engineers. It is a bit outdated but still highly useful for its chapters on curve fitting, VBA programming and raw data manipulation.
Excellent!! (but DOES have some minor errors)
The 2nd ed. of Financial Modeling by Simon Benninga (of the Wharton School, U Penn) and Benjamin Czaczkes is an EXCELLENT introduction to: (1) applied finance, (2) utilizing Excel as both a learning tool as well as a practical tool for finance, and (3) to some extent, computational finance. I HIGHLY recommend this book.
However ... CONTRARY to the the reader from London ... this book DOES have some minor errors (and they are errors even to those who ARE DEFINITELY familiar with Excel and VBA). Most of the errors are dealt with on Prof. Benninga's website ...There are some additional errors ... mostly VBA code in the latter chapters of the book (those chapters are devoted to a VBA tutorial) ... but these errors are relatively easy to debug. At any rate, the VBA code on the accompanying CD-ROM seem to be without error.
In spite of that cautionary note, to reiterate, this is an EXCELLENT book for students, academics, and practitioners. I especially found the Excel and VBA tutorial (sans the minor errors already noted) to be useful for teaching, learning, and application.
Too many errors and inadequacies
As a practioner of financial modeling, I was used to building financial models with SAS, Stata and Matlab, so when I was first asked by my new boss to start using Excel, I checked out this book. Unfortunately, it's grossly inadequate. The worst part is there are full of errors, encompassing typos in the Excel spreadsheets and technical inaccuracies. The coverage of a lot of topics is also quite superficial, for example, the chapters on calculating the efficient frontier ignore the important question of utility. (That is, the author maximizes wealth instead of utility.) In trying to cover a lot of ground in finance, from leasing to VaR to options, the book ends up doing nothing well, and the effort in presenting some theory before showing how it's implemented in Excel is laudable but ultimately laughable because much of the theory is presented quite poorly. In the end, you may find some value in understanding at a general level how to translate theory into Excel, esp. if you are new to the application.
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