applications

I highly recommend this book to any aspiring financial analyst. It is definitely worth it, even at the list price.

Want to master the fundamentals of basic finance using Excel? then this is one of the few books on the market that really meet this need. Want to set up more advanced mathmatics modeling? well as the introduction of this explains, this book is more like a cookbook: it lists the required basic ingredients and the culinary process but if you want to spice the dish (financial model) up, it is up to the individuals to dig out those advanced formulas from the financial trade journals and apply them to the models.

I first saw the first edition of this book in my college library. took it home and was EXCITED. I was looking for a practical book that would show me the intricacies of Excel for setting up financial models and this was like a god-sent. Like one of the other reviewers said, this book combined basic finance, Excel functions, and VBA programming. To add practicality to this book, Professor Benninga even showed how to download financial data from the internet. Granted it is rather basic, but it adds to the usability of his book, making it a well-round book.

The best parts are end-of-the chapter exercises. Solutions are provided in the accompanying CD-ROM. See how many ways can you solve the same problem.

Professor Benninga always outlines the assumptions and explains the parameters of each model. We should remember that in many instances, unrealistic assumptions lead to way-of-the mark numbers, rendering the whole modeling process and its calculations useless.

Want to become a advanced-level financial modeler? then master the fundamentals first! this book gets you started.

P.S. I also highly recommend to anyone just starting with Excel modeling to read William J. Orvis's Excel for Scientists and Engineers. It is a bit outdated but still highly useful for its chapters on curve fitting, VBA programming and raw data manipulation.

I recently got Benninga's book on financial modeling. I think it is a great book! For once, someone has taken the time to write a book that takes financial theory out of the classroom and follows it directly in a simple path to useful applications. Unfortunately all too many academic authors fail to take their work the final step and thus much of it can never be fully applied.

I went through many of the exercises and did not find any errors or mistakes. I suspect that those readers commenting on mistakes lack certain basic Excel skills (necessary for this book).

If you're interested in financial modeling, or want to sharpen your finance skills, this is the book to get.

As a practioner of financial modeling, I was used to building financial models with SAS, Stata and Matlab, so when I was first asked by my new boss to start using Excel, I checked out this book. Unfortunately, it's grossly inadequate. The worst part is there are full of errors, encompassing typos in the Excel spreadsheets and technical inaccuracies. The coverage of a lot of topics is also quite superficial, for example, the chapters on calculating the efficient frontier ignore the important question of utility. (That is, the author maximizes wealth instead of utility.) In trying to cover a lot of ground in finance, from leasing to VaR to options, the book ends up doing nothing well, and the effort in presenting some theory before showing how it's implemented in Excel is laudable but ultimately laughable because much of the theory is presented quite poorly. In the end, you may find some value in understanding at a general level how to translate theory into Excel, esp. if you are new to the application.