Customer Reviews

Finance

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First: this book is certainly not worth [the price] ...I read the 1998 softcover 'preliminary edition' by Bodie and Merton, which I ordered and received from amazon.com in fall, 1999. Samuelson's name was not on the cover and at any rate should not cause the price of the book to increase... The current price makes the book unattractive. Now for my review of the softcover version:

This is a relatively well-written undergraduate-level text that can be read/understood without the need for classroom instruction. It is especially useful for self-study by ordinary people who know nothing at all about finance theory but are motivated to learn. The reader will find all of the main topics covered: cash flows, efficient market hypothesis, capital asset pricing model (CAPM), risk management, hedging, and options pricing at Black-Scholes (B-S) level of discussion. In the spirit of the simple level of the text, the B-S equation is applied but not derived (best derivation is still the second one, and the Black's original method starting from the CAPM, in the famous 1973 Black-Scholes paper). `Fat tails' (known and largely ignored since Mandelbrot, 1962) and non-risk-neutral hedges, the frontiers of modern finance theory, are not discussed. Throwing the traditional `financial-engineering' bone in the direction of fat tails, implied volatility is discussed because in practice fat tails can't any longer be ignored. All in all, the book is recommendable to physics grad. students who want to learn finance terminology along with the main (wrong) ideas believed by the finance theory community. As an example of the book's weaknesses, the authors assume that the vague, undefined notion of `fundamental value' makes sense, and that liquid markets are in some vague, undefined sense `efficient' although the notion of a relaxation time is never mentioned. Typical finance theorists' shortcomings aside, this book can profitably be read before (or at least parallel with) Hull and other harder texts on derivatives. Liars' Poker and Fiasco can also be read profitably in parallel with this book. No knowledge of neo-classical ('marginal utility') econ (as is excesively taught in Samuelson's standard text) is required, and is at any rate is useless for finance theory/practice.

I was required to purchase this book for an MBA class in Business Finance. To put it simply, this book is terrible. There are errors in calculations from front cover to back. The describers used to name calculations are changed from page to page, without any consistency whatsoever, requiring a flow chart to understand what it is Bodie and Merton are discussing. Nobel prize or not, Mr. Bodie and Mr. Merton should be embarrassed to publish such trash.

Also, the way the questions are worded in the end of chapter reviews leave little relevance to what was taught in the preceding pages. Often questions that are asked are open-ended and very ambiguous.

I would not recommend this book to anyone and have asked my University to stop using this book because it is so flawed.

I am an MBA student-this was one of the worst textbooks I think I have ever had the misfortune to use. It was riddled with errors, which took me an hour to transcribe from the publisher's website. My entire class was confused by the end of chapter questions, which in some chapters seemed to have no connection to what was taught in the chapter. I and everyone else in my class wondered all along the way if we could trust what we were reading as being accurate. Stay away from this if you value your time and your sanity.

Like others, I too first saw this book in paper. I am now using it to teach a class of law students -- smart kids but mostly without great numeracy. I think it is working okay but (like so many coursebooks?) perhaps not as well as expected. One problem is indeed the typos -- I'm a sloppy writer myself and typos are my incubus, but with all the beta testing and with all the publisher support, you would think they could have done better (indeed, I sent my own list to the publisher back in the beta days -- I got a nice thank you but I don't see my name in the acknowledgments, so I suspect they hit the trash). Aside from that -- the presentation seems mostly clean and straightforward, but quite often too elliptical for my students -- I've felt I had to do a lot of backgrounding. Unlike other reviewers, I quite like the problems -- I think some of them press the envelope a bit, but that is just fine with me, exactly what they should do. I do feel that the authors bring together a remarkable lot of stuff in a compact and orderly manner. In this respect with this book as with so many other coursebooks, perhaps it is the case that the teacher is getting more out of it than the student.

"Have you seen the new Finance textbook?" The query making the rounds of business schools these days is uttered with such reverence that the question might as well be: "Have you seen the light?" Robert Merton, who shared last year's Nobel prize for economics, and Zvi Bodie, a professor at Boston University's business school, have penned what is being hailed as the definitive book in the field of finance. "This textbook will change the way finance is taught at business schools around the world," says James Angel, professor at Georgetown University's school of business. The eminent economist Paul Samuelson, who taught both authors when they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote the foreword to the book, calls it an "innovative work that sets a new pattern of excellence"...

Great book that actually teaches you finance.
I bought it as an additional reading material for my Corporate Finance and Investment Analysis classes. It helped me to pass with good grades and to get a better understanding of the subject in general.

Great first book on Finance.... Should be required reading for all college grads.

See also his Bodie's book Essentials of Investments.

there is a few bad review of this book. of course it is not a book for mba students, it is just good if you are in first year at university, easy to understand, and good introduction

I found this to be a great reference for self-study. As other reviewers have noted the book might not be up to par for graduate studies in accounting or finance but I have found it to be very useful for my business and personal finance. I like that the book includes chapters on risk analysis and a multitude of investments. There are plenty of typos as noted but the text is genreally very readable. The math is easy with good explanations. A good book.

This book is the worst finance book I've come across. I had to resort to a past finance book in order to get through the class that this book was assigned for. It has no mathematical basis for serious students of finance. There are numerous typographical errors.
An excerpt, "To give a simple example, consider the choice between alternative A - you get $100 today - and alternative B-you get $95 today. Suppose you had to guess how a stranger, about whose preferences and future expectations you nothing at all, would choose." This is UNIVERSITY LEVEL MATERIAL?!?
Do yourself a favor, look somewhere else and do not buy this [book]