Customer Reviews

The Handbook of Loan Syndications and Trading

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I recently received and read The Handbook of Loan Syndications and Trading. I purchased it because I am a lawyer who has recently begun working in the real estate and mortgage loan trading area, and wanted to get some deeper background on the loan sales and trading business operations of the financial institution clients I serve.

The Loan Sales and Trading Association (LSTA), the trade association for the loan sales and trading industry, has outdone itself with this fine book, which is a model of clarity which will set the standard in this field for years to come. It has contributions from a host of top experts in this field. In 20 years of practicing law, this work is by a country mile the most comprehensive and clearest professional book I have ever read. It does exactly the job I needed of providing the business background for a lawyer who works in this area. It would also be of great value to people who work in the financial services industry who work in the loan sales and trading area, as well as to those who work in other financial services areas who need to understand the expansive growth and functioning of the loan sales and trading field.

I cannot recommend this superb book highly enough.

The Handbook of Loan Syndications and Trading should be required reading for banking lawyers, bankers and borrowers. As a law school professor teaching in this area and former banking lawyer, the book opens up an area that is quickly transforming and changing the world's credit and lending markets. I found the book to be highly readable, concise and extremely helpful. The book is equally as valuable for the expert as well as the novice.

Although the LSTA helped drive its publication, the book is not a shill for the loan syndication market. Instead, its involvement has served as a catalyst to enlist authors who are truly the best and the brightest in this area. Without its involvement, many of these authors would probably never have participated in such an undertaking.

The book is valuable on both a micro and macro basis. It provides an excellent overview of the loan syndications market, helping the reading to appreciate and understand its depth, development and sophistication. On a micro level, the Handbook provides detailed analysis and instruction for those involved in negotiating and trading loans on a day to day basis. The Handbook is also easily accessed, with an excellent table of contents, index and glossary, allowing the reader to pick and choose topics of interest.

Christian Johnson
Law Professor, Loyola University Chicago School of Law

The book is strictly meant for those professionals involved in the field of putting together one of these loan arrangements or in doing trading of the created loans in a secondary market. It appears comprehensive, at least to a layman. And even for the latter, much of the text can be intelligible with careful parsing.

The biggest contrast between loans and stocks and bonds arises when considering trading. Stocks are, in some sense, fungible. So too with bonds. But the authors point out that this is certainly not so with loans. Each loan is often customised. Which adds a complexity that can defy easy valuations for trading purposes. To wit, a key section of the text addresses how to price such loans. Non-trivial.

I bought this book because I saw that it was for institutional investors and I was under the mistaken impression that I knew what that meant. This book was very confusing, since I apparently don't know as much about money as I thought I did. I'm not even really good at managing my own money, if I'm going to be comletely honest with myself. By the time I finished the book, I was even more perplexed than when I started it.

Excellent. Attention bankers: Keep this book in your corporate library. Goes beyond loan syndications and is a great source of information for other professionals in banking.