Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA

By admin • Jul 8th, 2008 • Category: Finance

Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA

Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA
By Mary Jackson, Mike Staunton

Publisher: Wiley
Number Of Pages: 276
Publication Date: 2001-05-30
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0471499226
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780471499220
Binding: Hardcover

This new and unique book demonstrates that Excel and VBA can play an important role in the explanation and implementation of numerical methods across finance. Advanced Modelling in Finance provides a comprehensive look at equities, options on equities and options on bonds from the early 1950s to the late 1990s.

The book adopts a step-by-step approach to understanding the more sophisticated aspects of Excel macros and VBA programming, showing how these programming techniques can be used to model and manipulate financial data, as applied to equities, bonds and options. The book is essential for financial practitioners who need to develop their financial modelling skill sets as there is an increase in the need to analyse and develop ever more complex ‘what if’ scenarios.

Specifically applies Excel and VBA to the financial markets
Packaged with a CD containing the software from the examples throughout the book
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Summary: Absolutely Great!
Rating: 5

Advanced Modeling is a fantastic book, and pretty easy to follow with relatively few coding errors. There are some books out there that have errors in the code that they use, which makes it difficult or someone to learn the techniques. Even for those without a solid background in VBA, this book can benefit you to start learning how to code properly. Anyone who is relatively proficient with Excel can definitely gain a new trick or two from reading this book. All you really need to start using this book is a basic understanding of finance concepts (e.g. portolio theory, capital budgeting, binomial options pricing, Black-Scholes, etc.). The techniques that are taught are also useful in other modeling exercises, and not necessarily just for finance-related topics.

Summary: A Cookbook for Financial Modellers
Rating: 5

Yes, the book won’t teach you CAPM, Black-Scholes, or much financial theory. But there is NO shortage of those books. There is a shortage of books with real-world Excel solutions to applying financial theory to data. I’ve had this book for a couple of years and have probably only used 10% of it, only because I don’t have time, real business need, to do the rest. I sometimes take it to bed to read and dream of having the time to try out some of their other models. That’s the only thing I can add to the other reviews here, the amount of love and passion for the subject put into this book. There’s not one extra padded word or graphic in this book. Yes, if there was one book I’d have to take to a desert island with Excel and some financial data this would be it.

Summary: Not really satisfying
Rating: 3

One of the main points of programming books is to help the reader understand the models being programmed. On this count, “Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA” fails miserably. There is very little explanation of the financial concepts and models. Anyone hoping to learn finance from this book will be very disappointed.

The result is a series of programming black boxes and ugly spreadsheets having only limited usefulness.

Although the level of his book is somewhat lower, Benninga’s “Financial Modeling” book is much better at explaining the conceptual basis of financial models. A good programmer will be better off with Benninga than with Jackson-Staunton.

Summary: Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA
Rating: 5

This is probably the best book written on financial modeling in excel, definitely worth the $50. Comes with a great CD-ROM. The books strength is its illustration of financial models and implantation in Excel. Since the models focus on static solutions the book is probably of greater use in academics than in industry. It would be great if there was instruction about how to input real time data into Excel and implement the models dynamically. Of particular interest to me is the great VBA code given on the CD, namely the code to calculate autocorrelation, cubic spines, eigenvalues and eigenvectors. This alone was worth the 50 bucks.

There are some major deficiencies in this book. Noticeably absent topics include: bond portfolio immunization; swap pricing; forwards and futures hedging; the ARCH, GARCH and CHARMA models.

My background is in finance, mathematics and computer science. Unlike the guy above, I don’t see any need for advanced mathematics in order to study this book. In fact I am sure you don’t. The point is to make excel do it for you. However it will a lot easier for those who understand the finance and mathematics behind what they are telling excel to do. I am assuming that those who are considering this book most likely have taken at least one college level calculus course and one statistics course. But I don’t think even that is necessary and definitely not stochastic calculus.

Summary: Highly Recommended
Rating: 5

VBA is one of those tools I long knew I should be proficient in but never got around to learning. That is, not until I found this book. It makes it easy for a financial professional to quickly come up to speed and start coding VBA within spreadsheets. The fact that the focus is on financial applications means that you learn coding techniques that will be useful on the job. I highly recommend the book!

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