The market leading Essentials of Investments, 7e by Bodie, Kane and Marcus is an undergraduate textbook on investment analysis, presenting the practical applications of investment theory to convey insights of practical value. The authors have eliminated unnecessary mathematical detail and concentrate on the intuition and insights that will be useful to practitioners throughout their careers as new ideas and challenges emerge from the financial marketplace. Essentials maintains the theme of asset allocation (authors discuss asset pricing and trading then apply these theories to portfolio planning in real-world securities markets that are governed by risk/return relationships).

Zvi Bodie is Professor of Finance and Economics at the Boston University School of Management. He is the director of Boston Universitys Chartered Financial Analysts Examination Review Program and has served as consultant to many private and governmental organizations. Professor Bodie is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he was director of the NBER Project on Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System, and he is a member of the Pension Research Council of The Wharton School. He is widely published in leading professional journals, and his previous books include Pensions in the U.S. Economy, Issues in Pension Economics, and Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System. Alex Kane is professor of finance and economics at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He was visiting professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo; Graduate School of Business, Harvard; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; and research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. An author of many articles in finance and management journals, Professor Kanes research is mainly in corporate finance, portfolio management, and capital markets, most recently in the measurement of market volatility and the pricing of options. Professor Kane is the developer of the International Simulation Laboratory (ISL) for training and experimental research in executive decision making.Alan Marcus is professor of finance in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He received his PHD in Economics from MIT in 1981. Professor Marcus recently has been a visiting professor at the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration and at MITs Sloan School of Management and has served as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also established the Chartered Financial Analysts Review Program at Boston College. Professor Marcus has published widely in the fields of capital markets and portfolio management, with an emphasis on applications of futures and options pricing models. His consulting work has ranged from new product development to provision of expert testimony in utility rate proceedings. He also spend two years at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), where he developed models of mortgage pricing and credit risk, and he currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Currency Risk Management Alliance of State Street Bank and Windham Capital Management Boston.