Customer Reviews

Investments (McGraw-Hill/Irwin Series in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate)

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

 

 

This book deals primarily with equity and bond investment finance. This is not a general finance book. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book, for example, to those who want to study corporate finance.

The book does a quite good, but not perfect, job of explaining the elegant finance subject matters such as CAPM, bond pricing, and risk management. For example, although I knew that higher stocks with higher Beta must have higher return than stocks with lower Beta (assuming CAPM is true), the book never bothers to explain precisely why. One must deduct the reasons from the CAPM assumptions and equations, which is not always intuitive.

The book also provides second set of questions for those who are studying for the CFA. I don't know how closely the book's questions resembles the real CFA questions.

I wish the book had more Excel examples and problems. Although the book does not ignore Excel, most of the problems and solutions involve using a calculator. Given that Excel, not the calculator, is the principle tool of finance (and even Excel is being upstaged by data analytics using terabytes of data), I thought the book was little too old fashioned in its examples, problems, and solutions.

Overall, this is a nice textbook with some of the best explainations of finance concepts I have ever read.

While this book is supposedly the best on investments, it lacks in a few key areas, namely fixed income. CFA supplemented bonds and fixed income readings were far superior to this book's.

However, it has plenty of practice problems and seems to provide a solid overview of key investment methodologies. This is ideal for asset managers or research analysts.

This is the best book of financial investments in the market. It has a great teaching method with demonstrations and examples. This new edition includes some topics about the financial crisis as well.

This book contains lots of information on the financial markets and products. Unfortunately, the publisher races through some topics or isn't very clear and there is no supplemental study guide to help. The problems at the end of each chapter are also really poorly written and don't seem very helpful in supplementing the material covered.

Avoid this book. The layout is very messy, it is too wordy and overly complicated. I am a mathematics student and I find this book terrible.

I have a major in finance but I think this book is really hard to understand. It's boring to read and the chapters are too long and too formula-based.