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Summary: This is not a review, is a petition
Review: I want to see the table of contents of this book. If it is possible e-mail it to me .Thanks ....
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Summary: simple and great
Review: I've allways looked for a really applied book about modeling (in finance and economics). this book answers to all my questions. It shows simply how to program all that complex formulas you had in your university books that you have never could use in professional life.
I think this book is, at present the best of its type.
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Summary: Chicken Soup for the Financial Analyst's Soul
Review: If you need to build a working valuation model, calculate the risk of a portfolio with 100+ securities, or figure out what return you might expect to get from a portfolio of high-yield bonds, then you'll find Simon Beninga's "Financial Modeling" merits far more than five stars: this is one book that is indispensable. One of the biggest problems I ran into during my MBA program was the way my professors taught Corporate Finance. I had great profs, true, but they were teaching theoretical concepts from theoretical textbooks. Sure, you learned the basics: CAPM, net present value, basic options and futures, Arbitrage Pricing Theory, VAR and TEV, but I have always maintained that the best way of learning a subject---particularly corporate finance---is by getting your hands dirty and digging into the guts of the material. Since Corporate Finance, off-balance sheet instruments aside, isn't very dirty, the best way to get a hands-on practical approach in terms of Capital Structure, the appropriate discount rate to use in pricing an asset, risk, and optimal debt and dividends is to program in Excel and Visual Basic. The problem is that many top finance texts don't offer supplemental material to translate the theoretical concepts into actual valuation and spreadsheet models, which any financial analyst will contend is the life-blood of the industry. With that in mind, Simon Beninga's "Financial Modelling" is a kind of "Joy of Cooking" for initiate investment bankers, corporate financiers, controllers, analysts, and anyone who wants to use core Corporate Finance concepts in the real world. Beninga goes through the standard laundry list of Corporate Finance text topics---from the optimal risky portfolio to the term structure of interest rates---and shows you how to translate these concepts into workable spreadsheet models that can illustrate, illuminate, and get to the heart of a problem. If you're a new MBA or financial analyst, you'll find much to love in Beninga's approach, and by pairing the newly expanded 2nd edition up with a top theoretical finance textbook (Ross, Westerfield et al.'s "Corporate Finance" is a fine example) you'll get the most out of your MBA program and have a solid foundation for building Excel and Visual Basic financial models that work. I liken "Financial Modeling" to a cookbook, in that Beninga provides all the ingredients necessary to the model at hand: he begins with a sprinkling of theory, whether it's modeling a bond portfolio's immunization, calculating the cost of capital, estimating a portfolio's Beta with no short-selling, or pricing put and call options using both the binomial theorem and Black-Scholes. His writing is spare, terse, and to the point, but I have learned more about advanced corporate finance theory through Beninga's marvellously pithy writing and copious Excel examples than I have in reading ten 'top of the list' finance books. In addition to nicely expanded sections on options (including portfolio insurance) and leasing (including the technically sophisticated subject of leveraged leasing, which requires Excel to comprehend), Beninga concludes his sprightly little tome with a section on getting the most out of Excel (useful little shortcuts that a financial analyst will need but may not have heard of) and a nice little introductory primer on programming in Visual Basic. "Financial Modeling" is an absolute essential if you're going to make Corporate Finance your profession. For an equally elegant and practical treatment of building discounted cash flow models for businesses, the reader would be advised to pick up Beninga's "Corporate Finance", which, while not equally oriented in spreadsheet modeling, is one of the most terse, accessible, and reasonably technically sophisticated Corp-Fin books on the market today.
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Summary: One of the BEST books I've read.
Review: Just a simple word.
BEST Financial Modeling by Excel !!!
Level: Amateur -> Intermediate
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Summary: Create and run financial models in Excel.
Review: Outstanding book. Without the need for VBA, this book allows you to run effective financial spreadsheets. It goes from simple pro-forma statements to binomial option pricing theory. With Damodaran's "On valuation," it is the most practical book in finance.
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Summary: Marvelous for so many reasons!
Review: Simon Benninga's book is fantastic! Before reading it, there was a great deal about the financial world that was a complete mystery to me. In spite of being proficient in Excel and VBA, Mr. Benninga still managed to show me things I didn't know. My only complaint was the mistakes which arose occasionally as I worked through the examples; but, these were few and for the most part easily fixed. I look forward to reading his other book!
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Summary: Wonderful book
Review: Since I bought this book, I've been able to develop much more sophisticated financial models. There's a lot of really useful info in this book: corporate, portfolio, options, bonds, and more. It's not only the modeling skills for corporate models which are helpful; I've also for the first time been able to figure out the literature on portfolio and option modeling. Thank you, Simon Benninga, for writing such a good book!
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Summary: A very useful book in the practice of Financial Management
Review: Thank you for your very excellent text on financial analysis. I found the writing excellent and the examples very useful in developing models. I will be using the specific subjects of "Financial Statement Modeling", "Valuation Analysis" and "Lease Analysis" in my practice. I congratulate you on a well written and documented book. I would very much like further discussion on the calculation of terminal value in chapter 2, page 30....Again, thank you for a most excellent tool. I will continue to use this text in my future work. Steve Schroder
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Summary: Ambitious topics, frequent errors
Review: The book tackles some pretty sophisticated topics and tries to present them in a simple, logical manner. However, there are a large number of errors and inconsistencies that make some of the examples difficult to follow.
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Summary: Practical Excel Models
Review: The simplicity and transparency of many of these models inspires me to give this book five stars. I am an expert modeller and find it useful to have an excel version of many of the more complex models as a cross-check and as a quick desk-top reference. People are often amazed at how quickly I can produce a ball park indication in which the handle is always correct. This book is a must for advanced model builders. If one can't produce a close answer in Excel, one may have to review the fundamentals before embarking on an advanced - and time consuming - model project. The only shortcoming is in the fastest growing new products in the credit derivatives world, but the methods in this book can be adapted. Tavakoli provides product descriptions in another excellent resource "Credit Derivatives".
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