Overview

[Note: eBook version of latest edition now available; see Amazon author page for details.] This revised ninth edition lays a firm foundation for thinking about and conducting investment. It does this by helping to build capital markets intuition and critical thinking skills. The material in this book is the product of 25+ years of investment research and experience (academic, personal, and professional), and 20+ painstaking years of destructive testing in university classrooms. Although the topic is applied investments, the integration of finance, economics, accounting, pure mathematics, statistics, numerical techniques, and spreadsheets (or programming) make this an ideal capstone course at the advanced undergraduate or masters/MBA level. The book has a heavily scientific/quantitative focus, but the material should be accessible to a motivated practitioner or talented individual investor with (for the most part) only high school level mathematics or intermediate level University mathematics. Although aimed at the advanced undergraduate or masters/MBA level, the careful explanations of a wide range of advanced capital markets topics makes this an excellent book for a U.S. PhD student in need of an easily accessible foundation course in capital markets theory and practice. There are literature reviews of multiple advanced areas, and more than 30 unanswered research questions are identified; these research questions would be ideal for a master's thesis or a chapter of a PhD. The applied nature of the book also makes it ideal for capital markets practitioners. For example, in one exercise, the reader is taken by the hand and walked through construction of a worked spreadsheet example of an active alpha optimization using actual stock market data. (The reader gets to build ex-ante alphas, and feed them into an optimization that weighs returns, risk, and transaction costs. A portfolio is rebalanced based on the optimization, and ultimately a backtest is conducted to measure ex post alpha.) Other practitioner material includes advanced time value of money (TVM) exercises, a review of retirement topics, extensive discussions of dividends, P/E ratios, transaction costs, the CAPM, and value versus growth versus glamour versus income, and a review of more than 100 years of stock market performance, and more than 200 years of interest rates. The list of references at the end of this edition of the book has 1,096 items from the academic and practitioner literature. The index has over 8,700 entries (in over 4,100 lines). Special attention is paid to more difficult topics like construction of Student-t statistics, the Roll critique, smart beta, factor-based investing, the Fama-French critique, and Grinold-Kahn versus Black-Litterman models. Every investor needs capital markets intuition and critical thinking skills to conduct confident, deliberate, and skeptical investment. The overarching goal of this book is to help investors build these skills. Note that a separate book with more than 500 test questions exists to accompany this book.

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