Finance in a Nutshell


Sometimes even the best professionals have long forgotten some key financial concepts, and others may never have learned them properly in the first place. Some want to broaden the scope of their financial knowledge, and many more simply need a desktop companion for quick and practical help with the tools and techniques of finance.

Whatever your role in the world of finance; student or executive, beginner or expert, this book is designed to explain and illustrate the working essentials of finance with clarity and speed.

Finance in a Nutshell deliberately combines essential theory with real-world application, using short, sharp chapters to help you find what you need and focus your attention. That way you can understand fast and implement right away. And since spreadsheets have become an indispensable tool for the business of finance, this book also shows how to implement these techniques in Excel.

Topics covered include: risk and return, total risk, optimal portfolios, diversification, systematic risk, CAPM and the cost of capital, downside risk, risk-adjusted returns, valuation models, bonds, prices & yields, default and market risk, duration and convexity, NPV and IRR, real options, corporate value creation, options, futures and forwards, currencies, statistics, normality, regression analysis and many more.

In every case, real-world examples bring the concept to life, drawing on the experience of companies such as American Express, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, Cisco, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase, McDonald’s, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Pepsi, Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, and Yahoo, among many others.

Investors, business executives and finance professionals, including investment bankers, portfolio managers, brokers and security analysts, should all find this book a valuable aid to getting up to speed on something real and relevant to their work, and MBA students will find it a helpful companion to the core concepts of Corporate Finance or Investments courses

If there’s a financial concept that you find hard to understand, easy to forget or simply necessary to apply with confidence, here it is in a nutshell!