Customer Reviews

Techniques of Financial Analysis: A Practical Guide to Measuring Business Performance

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

 

 

I bought an earlier version of this book many years ago and just bought the latest edition to replace the first copy that was loaned out and never returned. It's one of those books that you constantly go back to to confirm what you are doing. The book is well written, concise and covers material in a number of college level finanical courses. For the general Accountant, it is a learning tool and for the experienced Financial Analyst, an excellent reference.

Professor Helfert's graphic presentations have caused concepts to gel that were amorphous in my mind for years despite an investment banking background. I would recommend this book as a first book to anyone interested in quickly obtaining a bird's eye view of the business entity from a "business systems" approach. Helfert's position is that of an engineer or a scientist: Every business has a structure that can be indentified, analyzed, and then manipulated to increase shareholder value.

Every new issue refers back to the Investment, Operations, Financing structure Helfert lucidly charts out in the introductory chapter. If this is old hat to you, and you've read Corp. Fin. by Brealy & Meyers (sp?), maybe you don't need this book. All others: BUY IT!!!

This may be a great book if you already know everything about finance. I've taken MBA level Finance courses, and quite honestly, I found this book difficult to understand. The author casually mentions financial concepts without defining them and expect you to understand complex financial theories he hasn't covered.

I tried to do the questions at the end of each chapter, and while there is an answer guide, it does nothing to explain how the answer was derived. How you get the answer is the important part, but this text won't give you any assistance. Plus, some of the answers were just plain wrong (I checked with several experts).

There are better texts out there - your time is better spent elsewhere.

If you read a financial text w/o checking the numbers, you wouldn't find the mistakes. This book has had too many, because I am checking the numbers. I had to cross reference this book with a Financial Accounting text b/c I kept thinking I was incorrect.

All I have to say is take a look at pages 100, 101, 102 for great examples of the many mistakes. I am not happy.

By the way, I picked up this book from a friend in order to gauge whether I would buy the new version. Guess what I am not going to buy?

Arrival time is good, just the content of the book is not very useful for me.

I read russian translation of this book. There are only 8000 examples in russian and this book became a deficit in 1996 (when it was published in Russia). Now I want to read the English (original) version of this wonderful book. The most impressions are from the detailed (comprehensive) theory with detailed exercises and notes.

Let say my Great Thanks to author for his excellent book.

With regards, Sergey Krupin

This is the worst text book I have ever purchased for a class. It is full of errors and is very difficulty to follow. There are not enough practice problems and the answer key does not give enough information as to how the answer came about. There are discrepencies from one page to the next.