Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent supplement or study for your own enlightenment, December 9, 2005
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Supplement for Corporate Finance Course, April 23, 2004
This book is not an end unto itself, but it is an excellent companion to the leading corporate finance texts.The book is oriented toward the graduate student (MBA), and the texts it parallels are the most popular MBA texts on the market. Whether you are using texts by Ross (et al), or Brigham, Brealey, Keown, or Van Horne, the author Craig Holden has created these spreadsheeting materials to work directly with the text. Because Brigham, et al, is the largest seller; this book is most closely aligned with Brigham. But it also comes with outlines and notation changes to fit with the other major texts. The update (this is the second edition) is useful, but the first edition(s) were actually separate books. I preferred the separate book for each major author, but Holden is very succinct in his ability to tie this book to them all without the need for two or three different versions. Holden also wrote, and Prentice Hall published, versions that tie to undergraduate corporate finance texts, as well as both graduate and undergraduate investments books. In the first edition, the accompanying CD had an interactive version of the book. Unlike that first edition, the CD with this second edition does not carry the entire contents of the book; but that is OK, since it is easier to read the book than watch the CD on a computer screen. However, Holden makes very few actual spreadsheets available on the CD (three, to be precise). So, except for print versions in the text, if you want to see the models, you have to build the models. The book supports ONLY Excel. Personally, I always thought Lotus 1-2-3 was a better product and I would love to see such a book to support Lotus, but the world has gone Microsoft, and Excel is ubiquitous.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Diff between this one and Modeling in the fundamentals book, March 21, 2004
so, figured it out just now, even though it was pretty intuitive to begin with. Essentially this book caters to the graduate audience whereas the author's other book: Excel/Spreadsheet modeling in the **FUNDAMENTALS** of corporate finance/investing caters to the undergraduate version. While this is what I assumed, I could find no proof of it until now, at the authors website hidden in an obscure corner.
Hope this helps someone who is making a buying decision.
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