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 Excelandreg;. In this sense, this is a finance andquot;cookbook,andquot; providing recipes with lists of ingredients and instructions.

Areas covered include computation of corporate finance problems, standard portfolio problems, option pricing and applications, and duration and immunization. The second edition contains six new chapters covering financial calculations, cost of capital, value at risk (VaR), real options, early exercise boundaries, and term structure modeling. A new technical chapter contains a potpourri of tips for using Excelandreg;.

Although the reader should know enough about Excelandtrade; to set up a simple spreadsheet, the author explains advanced Excelandreg; techniques used in the book. The book includes chapters dealing with random number generation, data tables, matrix manipulation, and VBA programming. It also comes with a CD-ROM containing Excelandreg; worksheets and solutions to end-of-chapter exercises.

This finance course provides a guide to solving common financial models with "Excel" spreadsheets. This second edition of the course includes new chapters on financial calculations, cost of capital, value at risk (VaR), real options, early exercise boundaries and term structure modelling.

Simon Benninga is Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Finance at Tel Aviv University and Visiting Professor of Finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the founding editor-in-chief of European Finance Review.