Managerial-finance

This book, with accompaning applications workbook, provide the reader a great overview of Managerial Finance. The workbook problems takes the lessons taught within the book and put them into practical Real-Life applications. I have benefited greatly from both books and recommend them to anyone that may be entering the Managerial Finance field.

Both the book and applications workbook will provide any student with a very good Managerial Finance overview. The in-depth problems offered in the applications workbook put the provided concepts into reality.

As an undergrad taking his first finance class, I have have found this book to be quite useful. The concepts are explained in simplified, less-complicated ways and make reading each chapter less frustrating than perhaps some others (compared to some of the econ texts that I have had to use!).

It is well-written, concise, and employs some very straightforward, easy-to-follow graphs/diagrams. Also, both the formulas and the exercises at the end of each chapter are quite useful.

The only reason that I did not give it a 5-star rating is because some of the chapters did not use enough "real-world examples" or hypothetical situations in some of the more challenging lessons. This might better aid those students who are new to finance or simply need another angle to better grasp the idea.

Delivery was terrific. I received the book 6 days after I ordered it and it's brand new!

This book is very easy to follow and serves as a good reference for more advanced finance classes.

Hundreds of pages of insanely dense math with absolutely no practical information on how to apply chaos theory to the markets. In fact, the author seems to suggest that it may be impossible to use chaos theory as a prediction tool in the financial markets.

This is akin to a recipe book written by someone who thinks cooking is impossible, so all he can really write about is grocery shopping. NOT recommended! A much better book is "Trading on the Edge" by Deboeck.

The only cool thing about the book is that you can use it to impress your friends/enemies with the title and loads of arcane equations inside.

1) first, there is hardly *any* mention of markets in the
book. I only found two references
to the market in the entire book. the first reference was
early on where a couple of plots of the S&P were shown at
daily and weekly time frames, and the author stated that the
plots resembled each other and therefore this could be taken
as evidence of self-similarity.

the title of the book is mis-leading... it would be as if
a calculus textbook were to call itself "calculus in the markets"
simply because they have a section on compound interest...

2) there is a lot of hand-waving in the theory that is covered.
the author does cover a lot of ground, so it is understandable
that more details and explanations of certain subjects are
not provided. this book *is* a good bibliographic reference,
for example if one is interested in a particular topic, it
could be looked up in this book, and references to all the
seminal works are given.

3) there are better books out there that cover similar subject
matter, and *are* centered on the marketplace: for example,
Mandlebrot's "Fractals and Scaling in Finance", Lo and
MacKinlay's "A Non-Random Walk Down Wallstreet", William Brock
et al "Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos, and Instability", and
several books by Edgar Peters.

I'm surprised that this book got reader reviews that
are as favorable as the reviews posted before this one.

If you are interested in the mathematics of chaos and
dynamical systems, this might be a good book for you.
However, this book is densely packed with mathematics
and unless you have a very solid mathematical background,
Peitgen, Jurgens and Saupe's wonderful book "Chaos and
Fractals: New Frontiers of Science" might be a better choice.
This book covers the basic mathematics of dynamical systems
but does not delve into graduate level mathematics.

If you are thinking of buying this book because its title
mentions markets and non-linear financial time series,
save your money. The author spends five very mathematically
laden chapters discussing dynamical systems. There is nothing
solid on applying the mathematics of dynamical systems to
financial time series other than the observation that they
sure seem chaotic. At the very end the author weakly suggests
that dynamical systems theory might be applied to market
information, but he provides no examples.

People who develop successful market models usually don't
publish much on them, since there is a lot to be gained
by trading them. So one cannot catagorically state what has
and has not been done. However, I know of no case where
dynamical systems mathematics has been used to successfully
provide predictive models (e.g., models you can trade and
make money on) of financial markets. This book certainly does
not live up to the promise of its title.

There are a number of good book on time series analysis and
modeling. For example, see "Wavelet Methods for Time Series Analysis" by Donald B. Percival, Andrew T. Walden. This book
does not deal with financial time series directly, but it does
deal with "non-stationary" time series.