"Simon Benninga's book is the best resource on the market for people interested in DOING finance. The spreadsheet
examples are easily used,state-of-the-art and unique. The use of VBA is particularly useful, given that it is rapidly
becoming the programming language of choice on theStreet. I would highly recommend this book to both academics
and practitioners interested in constructing finance models. "
-- Tim Opler, Director, Liability Management, Deutsche Morgan Grenfelland Department of Finance, Ohio State
University
Too often, finance courses stop short of making a connection between textbook finance and the problems of real-world
business. Financial Modeling bridges this gap between theory and practice by providing a nuts-and-bolts
guide to solving common financial models with spreadsheets. Simon Benninga takes the reader step by step through
each model, showing how it can be solved using Microsoft Excel. In this sense, this is a finance "cookbook,"
providing recipes with lists of ingredients and instructions.
Areas covered include the computation of corporate finance problems, standard portfolio problems, option pricing
and applications, and duration and immunization. The author includes a set of chapters dealing with advanced techniques,
including random number generation, matrix manipulation, and the Gauss-Seidel method.
Although the reader should know enough about Excel to set up a simplespreadsheet, the author explains advanced
Excel techniques such asfunctions, macros, the use of data tables, and VBA programming. The book comes with a disk
containing Excel worksheets and solutions to end-of-chapter exercises.