Schaum's Outline of Investments

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book For The Do-It-Yourselfer
Review: A good book for someone who wants to learn the mathematics and mechanics of the various financial instruments.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book For The Do-It-Yourselfer
Review: A good book for someone who wants to learn the mathematics and mechanics of the various financial instruments.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to the beginning student of investment
Review: This book gives an excellent elementary introduction to investment techniques and concepts for the beginning student of business or economics. It is full of useful examples and solved problems as is characteristic of all books in this series, and it also gives adequate explanation of the terms and results in most areas of investment activity. Some of the parts of the book which are particularly well-written or helpful include: 1. The diagram of the corporate bond rating process . 2. The flowchart detailing a primary offering made through a syndicate of investment bankers. 3. The summary of the different security market indices. 4. The discussion of the "naive buy-and-hold strategy" and their use as benchmarks against which other investment strategies may be compared. 5. The discussion of the Dupont framework for analyzing equity returns and growth to reveal the sources of the growth of the firm. 6. The discussion of time-series comparisons for the ratios of a firm. 7. The discussion of the various problems involved when doing financial statement analysis. 8. The discussion on arbitrage. 9. The treatment of moving averages and the accompanying illustration of different moving averages. 10. The discussion of the random walk theory in the context of the efficient markets theory. The random walk theory has been been taken to be axiomatic by most financial analysts but has recently been challenged recently by empirical studies of financial data. 11. The treatment of the different levels of market efficiency, including the weakly efficient, the semistrong efficient, and the strongly efficient market hypotheses. 12. The discussion of the anomalies in market data that point to deviations from the efficient market hypothesis. 13. The chapter on portfolio analysis via the use of covariance and the treatment of the efficient frontier. 14. The treatment of the capital asset pricing model.