Book Description
Praise for
Financial Modeling with Crystal Ball(r) and Excel(r)
"Professor Charnes's book drives clarity into applied Monte Carlo analysis using examples and tools relevant to real-world finance. The book will prove useful for analysts of all levels and as a supplement to academic courses in multiple disciplines."
-Mark Odermann, Senior Financial Analyst, Microsoft
"Think you really know financial modeling? This is a must-have for power Excel users. Professor Charnes shows how to make more realistic models that result in fewer surprises. Every analyst needs this credibility booster."
-James Franklin, CEO, Decisioneering, Inc.
"This book packs a first-year MBA's worth of financial and business modeling education into a few dozen easy-to-understand examples. Crystal Ball software does the housekeeping, so readers can concentrate on the business decision. A careful reader who works the examples on a computer will master the best general-purpose technology available for working with uncertainty."
-Aaron Brown, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley, author of The Poker Face of Wall Street
"Using Crystal Ball and Excel, John Charnes takes you step by step, demonstrating a conceptual framework that turns static Excel data and financial models into true risk models. I am astonished by the clarity of the text and the hands-on, step-by-step examples using Crystal Ball and Excel; Professor Charnes is a masterful teacher, and this is an absolute gem of a book for the new generation of analyst."
-Brian Watt, Chief Operating Officer, GECC, Inc.
"Financial Modeling with Crystal Ball and Excel is a comprehensive, well-written guide to one of the most useful analysis tools available to professional risk managers and quantitative analysts. This is a must-have book for anyone using Crystal Ball, and anyone wanting an overview of basic risk management concepts."
-Paul Dietz, Manager, Quantitative Analysis, Westar Energy
"John Charnes presents an insightful exploration of techniques for analysis and understanding of risk and uncertainty in business cases. By application of real options theory and Monte Carlo simulation to planning, doors are opened to analysis of what used to be impossible, such as modeling the value today of future project choices."
-Bruce Wallace, Nortel
Customer Reviews:
goes beyond deterministic assumptions.......2007-06-24
The book is all about simulations. In financial modelling, as opposed to engineering or science. Readers from the latter 2 fields who have coded simulations will find much in common. The specific equations in the text for finance are largely different from what you've met before. But the basic treatment is essentially the same.
Typically, the text will describe some financial equation. The Crystal Ball program lets you easily generate random data as input to simulations, which it then runs.
Despite Excel in the book's title, the book is mostly about using Crystal Ball. Charnes shows how you can go well beyond a simple deterministic treatment of an income statement or balance sheet. Typically, most companies just use the deterministic approach. The danger is that this approach relies on certain assumptions. Using Crystal Ball and the book, you can test the effect of relaxing these assumptions on the balance sheet. A more robust approach to financial planning.
Financial Modeling with Crystal Ball and Excel.......2007-05-13
Acho que faltou um pouco mais de detalhes nos tópicos, porém o livro apresenta excelente modelos técnicos.
Book Description
Designed for learning professionals and drawing on both game creators and instructional designers, Learning by Doing explains how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of educational simulation for the right situation. It covers simple approaches that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer games and flight simulators. The book role models content as well, written accessibly with humor, precision, interactivity, and lots of pictures. Many will also find it a useful tool to improve communication between themselves and their customers, employees, sponsors, and colleagues. As John Coné, former chief learning officer of Dell Computers, suggests, “Anyone who wants to lead or even succeed in our profession would do well to read this book.”
Download Description
Designed for learning professionals and drawing on both game creators and instructional designers, Learning by Doing explains how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of educational simulation for the right situation. It covers simple approaches that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer games and flight simulators. The book role models content as well, written accessibly with humor, precision, interactivity, and lots of pictures. Many will also find it a useful tool to improve communication between themselves and their customers, employees, sponsors, and colleagues. As John Con, former chief learning officer of Dell Computers, suggests, & Anyone who wants to lead or even succeed in our profession would do well to read this book.
Customer Reviews:
Learning By Doing.......2007-06-02
Although Aldrich provides a good guide with an overall view of pitfalls or benefits of serious games, I did not think there was enough depth in design and effective learning techniques for my research needs. For an HR or training professional who wants to get an extensive overview in this field, this book would be very useful.
highest recommendations as an introduction to the most current research and pedagogy in educational technology.......2007-04-18
In 1985, I started developing educational computer simulations in DOS on the IBM PC. Since that time I have been involved in every new form of educational technology.... touchscreen, videodisc, CD-ROM, internet. For the last 8 years I have been consulting in corporate training. To try to stay smart, I read everything I can get my hands on.
After reading Learning by Doing by Clark Aldrich, I am completly blown away. Clark is a genius. This book is relavent and puts into context everything I have been doing for 22 years.
This book captures in a fun, easy to read informative style, both the pedagogy and technology for creating state of the art e-learning experiences.
I have never been motivated to write an Amazon review before, but I can't over emphasize my enthusiasm for this book. I have already had several of my clients buy this book. The book is well researched and completely current with latest trends and advancements. The use of bullet lists and charts/ diagrams is very helpful. The index is more comprehensive and complete than any book I have ever seen. Clark's editorial comments are right on target.
The book is not a dense encyclopedia, so if that is what you are looking for then supplement your library with some of the other current titles on blended learning. I give this book my highest recommendations as an introduction/ overview to the most current research and pedagogy in the use of educational technology for corporate training.
I especially recommend this book for corporate trainers who are trying to figure out how to evolve from instructor led to a blended learning paradigm.
Read this book second.......2005-12-08
I just finished reading "Learning By Doing" from cover to cover. Those who are practicing in this field will want to read this book to learn of techniques that might not be readily apparent such as branching stories and interactive spreadsheets. I would recommend that they read "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" by James Paul Gee first, however, as I found the writing style of "Learning By Doing" a little sparse, like fleshed out bullet point slides. It is clear, though, that the author has a lot of experience in this topic and his book is a contribution to the field.
Another Winner by Clark.......2005-10-30
It is no secret that "conventional eLearning" is not as engaging, interactive and interesting-and therefore also not as effective-as it should be. And we know that even current technology has the potential to do much more for "eLearning," or "technology-enabled learning" than we see today. And the rate of change in most technology is accelerating rather than slowing. It is the future potential that excites most of us who are involved in learning technology.
Games and simulations (G&S) is clearly one of the most interesting and exciting areas of learning technology and undoubtedly will play a big part of "next generation (e)Learning," whether in schools, universities, government or industry. This is now being recognized, and evidenced by the growing number of "conferences-within-conferences" (seen most recently at the Training Fall Conference and Expo in Long Beach) or the Serious Games Summit in WDC-to mention just two-dedicated to the topic of G&S.
Clark's book is a most welcome addition to the growing literature covering G&S-and it is a book I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning technology. And if you are involved in some way in learning and training, you cannot avoid technology and if you want to be conversant and be ready to make (smart) decisions on issues that undoubtedly will soon come your way, if they have not already, the ROI on the money spent on Clark's book will no doubt be great.
Clark is a highly respected analyst-with a long history of insightful writing on learning and learning technology (which thousands of practitioners and analysts have enjoyed for a number of years)-as well as a simulation developer, and a business executive (leading Simulearn). Few others can equal his credentials in the area of learning technology so even before the book arrived in my mailbox I knew that this would be one I would enjoy and find very useful. It did not disappoint me.
Not only is it well written but it is a very nice combination of the following:
-- Clear analysis of different types of G&S. This is very useful as it will help future discussion and dialog and reduce the confusion that results when people think they are talking about the same things but in fact are not. Even if one does not agree with Clark's taxonomy he is nevertheless doing us a service by stimulating a richer dialog around these issues.
-- Lots of good examples. Especially for readers interested in using G&S in their organizations, and therefore need to understand the practical side of G&S, Clark's book is very useful as it provides a range of different examples covering the different types of G&S discussed in the book. The examples come from different types of users and sectors, and few application areas exist where G&S could not be highly useful.
-- Challenges that lie ahead. Because of Clark's varied background he is very well positioned to reflect on the challenges that lie ahead and to give a realistic assessment of where we are heading with G&S. As with other analysts, like Clark Quinn, for instance, Aldrich recognizes that the future for G&S is no cakewalk. It is very hard-and often costly-to build high quality, customized simulations, for instance, as Clark learned when he built Virtual Leader. But as tools and technology improve, as more vendors compete and offer better products, and as buyers recognize the benefits of G&S (See the excellent work by James Gee at the Games and Professional Practice Simulations at the Academic ADL Co-lab, for instance) and demand thus accelerates, "effective cost" per user (nominal cost normalized by learning effectiveness) will no longer be a major adoption barrier.
Clark is also one of the most popular speakers on the conference circuit so once you have read his book you will have more to talk to him about when you meet him at one or more of the upcoming events where he will speak.
Eilif Trondsen, Ph.D.
Director
Learning on Demand Program
SRI Consulting Business Intelligence
(...)
Aldrich Framework Extends to Assessment.......2005-09-17
[...]
I really enjoyed "Learning by Doing" Clark. Your frame of thinking helps place things into a space for mulling over the possibilities. I noticed the big "we have no idea" at the end of the interviews on the question of measuring the effectiveness. That is a big challenge, and I think the way there is already being constructed by Mislevy and others in the "adaptive testing" arena - but instead of giving an adaptive test, we'll just make an unobtrusive observation using the same rigorous theory base without hurting the playability, fun, sim aspects.
What you called the "universal truths" (I wasn't as convinced about sticking it in the intersection of games and sims) are also called "generic structures" in the systems dynamics literature - you probably know that. It makes one wonder if in the authoring environments of the future, those structures will be facilitated through wizards to help people build games and sims. With a few critical questions, the agent could "fill-in" a generic structure to some extent...including capturing the causal chains of events (e.g. what happens first?, when that goes up what does it do to the second thing?).
I really like the clarity of the framework of "sim, game, pedagogy" crossed with "systems, cyclical, linear" and also the idea that sims allow-uses discovery/practice, games allows-uses testing/softening and pedagogy allows-uses presentation/support. The Mislevy (et al) assessment model has four parts: task model (a bit like the sim in that it is the model of everything that the user could be doing, sets the context and expectation), user model (a bit like the game in that it models in clear computational terms what the "winning" user will be doing), the evidence model and presentation layer (collects data, makes judgements about what the user knows, and selects the next item to present to the user). The presentation layer is a bit mechanical...so really the three essential parts of any assessment are the task, user and evidence models, which I think can be brought into a useful alignment with your framework - in order to go after that issue about metrics of effectiveness.
Another thing your model makes me think of is that on the content type side, cyclical contains linear and is contained by systems. e.g. systems models have both linear and cyclic causal relationships, simple cycles are first created by two linear relatinships that bounce back to each other...and curvilinear paths of many kinds are essentially linear at the microscopic level. So that leads me to wonder (and I think your chapters make this point) that pedagogy is contained in games (i.e. games teach) and are contained by sims (i.e. sims can be fun, have prefered goal states like "winning" or "succeeding", use scores, give feedback. etc.) These metaphors might break down on some issues, but they're giving me pause to reflect and relate to your framework.
Amazon.com
Recall the old saying about all work and no play making Jack a dull boy? World-class companies today need play--serious play--if they want to make truly innovative products, argues Michael Schrage, an MIT Media Lab fellow and Fortune magazine columnist. In Serious Play he writes, "When talented innovators innovate, you don't listen to the specs they quote. You look at the models they've created." Whether it's a spreadsheet that tests a new financial model or a foam prototype of a calculator, what interests Schrage is not the model itself, but the behavior that play--be it modeling, prototyping, or simulation--inspires.
Schrage examines the approaches to successful prototyping at companies such as AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft, and DaimlerChrysler and describes the kind of culture that's needed for encouraging innovation. In the last chapter, he lays out the 10 rules of serious play, including: Be willing to fail early and often; know when the costs outweigh the benefits; know who wins and who loses from an innovation; build a prototype that engages customers, vendors, and colleagues; create markets around prototypes; and simulate the customer experience. Well-written and inspiring, Serious Play, is a first-rate user's guide for managers, project leaders, and other innovators. --Dan Ring
Book Description
Serious Play is about serious work: how the world's leading companies model, prototype, and simulate to innovate. Increasingly, prototypes are the key platforms and models are the core media for managing risk and creating value. They allow for cost-effective creativity, encourage profitable improvisation, and inspire organizations to collaborate in unexpected ways.
Serious Play is a crisply written handbook for product, process and project leaders who are determined to manage their innovation initiatives successfully.
As digital technologies for modeling and simulation offer more value for less money, they provoke fundamental challenges to organizational culture and design. MIT research associate Michael Schrage asserts that conventional wisdom surrounding innovation gets turned inside out: What innovative companies choose not to model often proves more important than what they do. Contrary to the popular assumption that innovative teams generate innovative prototypes, in fact innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. How innovators play with their models and simulations invariably matters far more than what they actually plan. In fact, Schrage shows why innovative firms cannot seriously plan unless they seriously play.
Drawing upon a range of companies as diverse as Walt Disney, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, General Electric, IBM, IDEO, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler and American Airlines, Schrage identifies the common patterns and practices that distinguish productive prototyping cultures from pathological ones. He explores the intimate connection between how leading innovators model reality and how they actually manage it. He examines prototyping failures as rigorously as he explains prototyping successes.
The essential message of
Serious Play is that tomorrow's innovations will increasingly be the byproduct of how companies and their customers behave-and misbehave-around this new generation of models, prototypes, and simulations. The distinction between serious play and serious work dissolves as technology gives innovators ever-increasing opportunities to simulate and prototype their ideas. As the media for modeling radically change, so will the organizations that use them.
With real-world examples and engaging anecdotes, Schrage argues that the future of prototyping is the future of innovation. A User's Guide included in the book helps readers quickly take away the innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive voices in the field of innovation,
Serious Play will lay serious claim to the hearts and minds of forward-looking business managers.
Download Description
Successful innovation demands more than a good strategic plan; it requires creative improvisation. Much of the "serious play" that leads to breakthrough innovations is increasingly linked to experiments with models, prototypes, and simulations. As digital technology makes prototyping more cost-effective, serious play will soon lie at the heart of all innovation strategies, influencing how businesses define themselves and their markets. Author Michael Schrage is one of today's most widely recognized experts on the relationship between technology and work. In Serious Play, Schrage argues that the real value in building models comes less from the help they offer with troubleshooting and problem solving than from the insights they reveal about the organization itself. Technological models can actually change us--improving the way we communicate, collaborate, learn, and innovate. With real-world examples and engaging anecdotes, Schrage shows how companies such as Disney, Microsoft, Boeing, IDEO, and DaimlerChrysler use serious play with modeling technologies to facilitate the collaborative interactions that lead to innovation. A user's guide included with the book helps readers apply many of the innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive voices in the field of innovation.
Customer Reviews:
Readable User-Friendly Book on Innovation.......2005-04-30
I am enjoying this book. I like the title "Serious Play", but I dislike the sub-title "How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate". Companies don't innovate people do is my thought. I think the author could have taken this concept one step further. That is tie in the concepts of how innovation relates to chaos theory and fractals and larger concepts. The author's ideas are not that new to me because I am a project manager in a software engineering environment where prototyping and iterations is the name of the game. We have at most 3 months to make a difference, to deliver and then we are swept into the ocean of change. You have a small window of opportunity before both the game and the players change.
I think that the world may be on the verge of moving so fast that we begin to see things like the wiki, open source culture in that it takes all of us innovating collectively in serious play. Long term I wonder if you are not free, workable and now, you are not in the game.
Some concepts for me are:
1) Importance of being able to improvise in the moment
2) Prototyping both reveals the underlying power cutural structures and changes them.
3) Human beings are relationship morphing entities.
4) the importance of shared collaboration space that invite clever interactions between people.
5) Treating prototypes as conversation pieces
6) Watch for the underlying feeling of geniune fun
7) The importance of the challenge or obstacles to the game
8) We shape our models, our models shape us
9) "In order to have actionable meaning, the fuzzy mental models ... must be externalized in representations in ways... that can be grasped"
10) Prototypes force individuals to confront the tyranny of tradeoffs (i.e. difficult decisions)
11) "All models are attempt to manage the complexity by making it simpler and more accessible"
While the text is very readable I had trouble pulling out the underlying structure of the book. But I felt redeemed when I read the User's Guide at the end of the book. Interesting you would think a User's Guide would go at the beginning. Fortunately I do not read sequentially so I found that chapter fairly quickly.
Three years on, still a great book.......2002-09-16
Here's the best review I can give Michael Schrage's "Serious Play": Three years on, it's consistently the first book I pull out of my bookshelf when I'm looking for ideas for presentations, thoughts on introducing new products or services, etc. His commentary on "mean-time-to-payback" is something that will stick with you for years. It's brilliant stuff, written in clear, concise terms. And, surprisingly, very little of it is dated. Unlike many books from that era, there's no .com or Enron fixation for the author to be embarrassed about. Schrage's examples are pulled from health care technology, animation, theater...in short, an eye-opening spectrum of ideas. I consider "Serious Play" one of my best purchases ever.
Preaching to the choir.......2002-08-22
This is a good book for someone to read if they are skeptical of the benefits of prototypes. However, since I already know the value of interactive prototypes I became quickly tired with the book.
Other critiques: it felt like the author had a bunch of cool little examples lying around and finally got the idea to put it together, surrounded by some fluffy text to make it thick enough to sell as a book, and put it on the market. Lots of space is taken up by these excerpts, as well as big text in the margins summing up "important points," which I would usually find useful but instead gave the impression of just taking up space.
Also, the author makes repeated use of similes to the point that it got annoying; "Just like a is to b, c is to d."
At one point, the author brings up the difference between a "simulation" and a "prototype," and just when you think the core of the matter is going to be distinguished the author backs out, leaving you wondering why they brought it up in the first place if they weren't going to take a stab at defining and differentiating them.
Sorry, but given the hype I was sorely disappointed. Read the first chapter or so in a bookstore before actually buying this.
Enlightening.......2002-07-11
This book gave me a very good and new insight of how to manage prototyping. It is enlightening for not only it explains and lists the topics that are important. It also gives us lots of practical examples of implementations.
I kept refering it, and i DON't usually do that.........2001-03-14
The most significant aspect of this book is that it provides a vocabulary and a language to discuss the nature of creative prototyping and modeling behaviors. The first thing you do is take off the cover, otherwise people think you're reading a really cheesy book. It's everything but that. It's been 4 weeks, and i'm on my 3rd time through it. I reference it and re-use it over and over. I've since recommended it to a genetic scientist friend of mine that works for a major drug company, a software engineer, and a broadcast designer. The thinking in this book has an epidemic effect with those that read it, and the excitement that it carries into their work and mine is the most influential and direct I have ever experienced. Some books are relevant once, but this will be accessed for years to come. This is my first book recommendation i have ever made. that is all...
Book Description
"Mr. Salov has taken one of my favorite creations – Perfect Profit – and provided an expanded description of his interpretation of it and put it in your hands with the included software. Like I said fifteen years ago, Perfect Profit is an important tool for the trading system developer. See for yourself."
—Robert Pardo, President, Pardo Capital Limited
"A very in-depth reference for programmers that should serve well into the future. The code herein lends itself well to other syntactically similar programming languages such as Java, PHP, and C#."
—Ralph Vince
The goal of trading is to make money, and for many, profits are the best way to measure that success. Author Valerii Salov knows how to calculate potential profit, and in Modeling Maximum Trading Profits with C++, he outlines an original and thought-provoking approach to trading that will help you do the same.
This detailed guide will show you how to effectively calculate the potential profit in a market under conditions of variable transaction costs, and provide you with the tools needed to compute those values from real prices. You'll be introduced to new notions of s-function, s-matrix, s-interval, and polarities of s-intervals, and discover how they can be used to build the r- and l-algorithms as well as the first and second profit and loss reserve algorithms. Optimal money management techniques are also illustrated throughout the book, so you can make the most informed trading decisions possible.
Filled with in-depth insight and expert advice, Modeling Maximum Trading Profits with C++ contains a comprehensive overview of trading, money management, and C++. A companion CD-ROM is also included to help you test the concepts described throughout the book before you attempt to use them in real-world situations.
Customer Reviews:
should have been a short journal article.......2007-06-29
SUMMARY: A potentially useful concept taken to ridiculous extremes.
The main theme is around the concept of *potential profit* offered by a particular market. When building automated trading strategies or evaluating human trader performance, the problem could be decomposed into a product of some intrinsic profit offered by the market and the percentage of that profit that is captured by a particular trader or strategy. This book spends most of its attention on the former factor and various derived performance metrics.
*Potential profit* is defined by an idealized strategy that has *perfect foresight about all future prices over a given time interval*. In addition to the original concept apparently suggested by Robert Pardo, the book's definition is made more realistic by constraining such a strategy with non-zero transaction costs. Although this connection is not made by the author, the concept is related to those used in offline algorithms and competitive analysis (see, for example, Online Computation and Competitive Analysis): in essence, you want to quantify the amount of *regret* you experience comparing your performance to that of a perfect adversary or algorithm that is allowed to solve the offline version of the same problem (with all of the future data available at the outset).
Three iterations of potential profit algorithms are introduced:
1. "r-/l-algorithms": position size is constrained with a given maximum. The perfect strategy can be proven to be pure reversal -- except for initial and final transactions, the maximum profit is obtained by always switching positions between +max_size and -max_size at certain transaction points. Although the underlying problem could be solved using a generic optimizer, Salov introduces a concept of *s-intervals* that makes it easy to see how the global maximum can be computed with a simple linear algorithm. This algorithm offers conceptual elegance of solving its related problem exactly -- the later two are heuristic improvements for less constrained versions of the problem.
2. "first P&L reserve algorithm": strategy remains a pure reversal strategy but position size is allowed to vary subject only to self-financing/account margin/buying power constraints. #2 can improve on #1 due to increases in account buying power after the initial entry/exit transactions.
3. "second P&L reserve algorithm": same as #2 but the strategy is allowed to change existing positions in between the transaction points used by #1 and #2, i.e. the strategy is no longer pure reversal. Again, #3 can improve on #1 due to increases in account buying power during trading.
Since both #2 and #3 consider how account equity grows over time subject to self-financing restrictions, connections to Kelly/Shannon
maximum growth rate formulas arise naturally. In later chapters, all algorithms are used to derive performance metrics and to compare potential profits offered by various markets using real-life price data.
Unfortunately, in my view the author should have stopped at #1 and not gone on for 180 more pages. Granted, the overall approach of comparing your actual performance to that of some idealized benchmark strategy is extremely sound and useful. As a benchmark, a single simple idealized strategy is sufficient. But the author does not emphasize enough that the single biggest advantage the idealized strategy has is the perfect knowledge of future prices. Algorithm #1 already has this advantage built in and there seems to be little practical value in gleaning further incremental benefits by adding optimal account growth heuristics. (Optimizing position sizes can't be done in real-life without simultaneously controlling risk etc.) In fact, the last chapter has a cocoa contract example making 13000% returns in just 5 days! Similarly, in some examples algorithms #2 and #3 manage to grow exponentially into such large position sizes that they overflow a 32-bit integer -- it is surprising that the author does not see the ridiculousness of that and reluctantly suggests that the algorithms should be applied to "short time intervals" or "with high transaction costs".
Other book shortcomings that seemed glaring to me:
- only deterministic strategies are considered. Real-life strategies have to incorporate uncertainty modeling in their decisioning. Furthermore, deterministic-only strategies can't reach Nash equilibria for some problems.
- only two commission cost models are considered: fixed per transaction and cost as a function of instrument price. Something like cost/share would invalidate much of the discussion.
- because they have perfect price foresight all idealized algorithms unavoidably go wild on max'ing out position sizes. In real life, risk management constraints on open positions can kick in sooner than margin constraints, unless you are diversified across many positions (situation not considered in the book).
- after observing how much the transaction costs can impact these idealized strategies, the author nonetheless goes on and makes very ballpark guesses about slippage etc -- it seems incongruent after all that energy spent on perfecting those strategies.
15 years is not enough: a new market property.......2007-02-25
I am a professional mathematician with a personal interest in mathematical finance and I know the author. I did not expect Dr. Salov to be writing a book but eventually I became one of the first readers. The book focuses on modeling and calculation of the potential profit - a new and fascinating market property. It also contains a gentle introduction explaining basic trading, financial and programming terms and helping better to understand the main topic. Therefore, the book should be interesting for all market participants: trading system developer, trader, theoretician working on finance or someone who wishes to learn the field of trading systems and quantitative finance.
It is interesting that the potential profit, as introduced by Robert Pardo, corresponds to a classical notion of a total variation of a function, the function being the time sequence of prices of a commodity. Computation of the potential profit in the presence of e.g. transaction costs becomes a sophisticated mathematical problem which Dr. Salov solves using the newly suggested r- and l-algorithms. In a systematic way, the author introduces s-function, s-matrix, polarity, s-intervals and proves their properties, producing an effective r- and l-algorithms.
While Robert Pardo introduced potential profit as a new concept, Valerii Salov brings this concept to a substantially higher level. He considers the maximum profit as a market property, which must be combined with a sequence of trading actions - trading strategy. He systematically comes the way from simple market and trading systems performance measures to a powerful and automatic tool filtering the most critical price events. This becomes possible because he takes into account transaction costs such as commissions, slippage, and others. A motivation for each decision leading to the complete software, new algorithms, or money management is carefully explained.
I highly recommend reading this book for anyone interested in development of trading systems and who wants to understand better the work of markets.
Book Description
In today's increasingly competitive financial world, successful risk management, portfolio management, and financial structuring demand more than up-to-date financial know-how. They also call for quantitative expertise, including the ability to effectively apply mathematical modeling tools and techniques, in this case credit.
Credit Risk Modeling using Excel and VBA with DVD provides practitioners with a hands on introduction to credit risk modeling. Instead of just presenting analytical methods it shows how to implement them using Excel and VBA, in addition to a detailed description in the text a DVD guides readers step by step through the implementation. The authors begin by showing how to use option theoretic and statistical models to estimate a borrowers default risk. The second half of the book is devoted to credit portfolio risk. The authors guide readers through the implementation of a credit risk model, show how portfolio models can be validated or used to access structured credit products like CDO’s. The final chapters address modeling issues associated with the new Basel Accord.
Customer Reviews:
very good guide to credit risk modeling.......2007-08-10
Finally a book came out that concerns the "normal" credit risk modeling as opposed to just credit risk pricing of derivatives and structured products. This book is excellent. I give it 4 stars because of the choice of the software, i.e. Excel. Almost everyone who is doing this kind of analysis is not doing it in Excel (from experience) but rather S-PLUS, R or SAS. But ok, not that big of a problem.
I would say that this is a good guide to credit risk modeling, but the reader should fill quite a lot for him/herself, but this will come from practice. Overall, the authors present the problems and solutions in a intuitive way and quite narrative, which makes it an easy read. They also explain the Excel and VBA code rather than just presenting it, which enables the reader to reproduce it easier.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone in credit risk management and especially to universities and students as often they come unprepared to the real world of credit risk modeling.
Very useful manual.......2007-07-05
A very instructive and useful manual that disclose on a simple and in excel sheet programable way the great secretes of some most popular vendors modules. For every one who is puzzeled with high sofisticted formula for the simple things
Credit Risk Modeling using Excel and VBA .......2007-07-03
The book is a very good guide for anyone who is not familiar with Excel, VBA and or credit risk modelling. Even for the more experienced practitioner there is something to learn. For anyone wanting a practical guide I would thoroughly recommend this book.
Book Description
This book provides detailed coverage of BPEL4WS, its syntax, and where, and how, it is used. It begins with an overview of web services, showing both the foundation of, and need for, BPEL. The web services orchestration stack is explained, including standards such as WS-Security, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction, WS-Addressing, and others. The BPEL language itself is explained in detail, with Code snippets and complete examples illustrating both its syntax and typical construction. Having covered BPEL itself, the book then goes on to show BPEL is used in context. by providing an overview of major BPEL4WS servers. It covers the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 in detail, and shows how to write BPEL4WS solutions using these servers.
Customer Reviews:
Could be a great book.......2007-05-30
This is a good book for those seeking an initial view of process and BPEL. The book covers the basics of BPEL profile 1.1, and until chapter 4 is a good resource of information. I don't like books that binds the technology to an specific implementation, and that's the case of the book after chapter 4, it binds examples to Oracle BPEL process servers (which I've already used in production and find it a poor implementation) and Microsoft Biz Talk (never used it). It would be much better if more real world examples could be provided instead of specific providers mechanisms for deploying, creating etc. This should be a readers choice, and the product manuals take care of that. I'm a great fan of the author, have read many of his books, this one had everything to be on my top shell, but, if only there was no more chapters after the 4th.
Just my 2 cents.
BPEL just may be the future of business data communications.......2006-03-29
There have been an entire bowl of alphabet soup regarding various kinds of distributed processing systems. All of them, in their time, achieved a certain level of usage. None of them has done much to change the basic way we do business communications. That may be changing.
The development of the internet from a little system to exchange technical papers to a worldwide set of sites, all speaking internet protocol, have generated the expansion of broadband services all across the world from New York City to small towns in the third world. The basic ability of an individual to seek information has subsequently been expanded with XML so that information can be exchanged between computers of different types with different operating systems easily and without having to understand the characteristics of the computer at the other end. XML is a very open standard and it has some weaknesses. Enter BPEL to establish a set of standards, some common ways of doing things, and a generally more organized approach.
BPEL servers have been developed by, and there are URLs to: Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Sun and at least four open-source implementations.
While this is a beginners book in so far as BPEL is concerned, it is presumed that the reader has some experience with XML, web services, and some kind of web services developent system such as J2EE or .NET.
A response from Packt Publishing.......2006-01-21
This is a response from the Publisher, Packt, in reply to the two reviews below...
The code examples in the book have been written for the Oracle BPEL Process Manager version 2.x, which has been one of the few working BPEL engines at that time (2004, former Collaxa engine). In the mean time, Oracle BPEL Process Manager has been upgraded to version 10.1.2 and code examples required some minor modifications. New code examples have been available from the publisher's web site (www.packtpub.com). If Oracle BPEL Process manager is installed appropriately, code examples definitely work.
Please notice that the 2nd Edition of the book is about to be published in January 2006. The 2nd Edition has been improved, particularly with the introduction of SOA and BPEL, and coverage of advanced features of Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft BizTalk.
This answers the complaints in the last two customer reviews, thank you.
Packt Publishing
book needs a revision........2006-01-17
This book introduces bpel using oracle bpel engine beyond that this book fall short of introducing the bigger picture in terms of soa. the book also needs a revision. this book also suffers too much repetition and poor editing.
Good Intro to BPEL - Poor examples.......2006-01-02
The book really did a good job about introducing the BPEL Spec..saves much of your time from Google. Beyond that, the examples using Oracle BPEL Engine are poorly written and too confusing. After the first 3 chapters, the book chapters stretches in different directions and I doubt the editors/authors did a final review together. The code examples are not working ! This means ..I regret to say 60% of book is not worth reading.
Book Description
Simulations and the Future of Learning offers trainers and educators the information and perspective they need to understand, design, build, and deploy computer simulations for this generation. Looking back on his recent first-hand experience as lead designer for an advanced leadership development simulation, author Clark Aldrich has created a detailed case study of the creation and deployment of an e-learning simulation that had the development cycle of a modern computer game. With this book Aldrich, a leader in the e-learning field, has created an intriguing roadmap for the future of learning while taking us along on an entertaining rollercoaster ride of trial and error, success and failure. Simulations and the Future of Learning outlines the design principles and critical decisions around any simulation's componentsâ the interface, the physics and animation systems, the artificial intelligence, and sets and figures. Using this accessible resource, readers will learn how to create and evaluate successful simulations that have the following characteristics: authentic and relevant scenarios; applied pressure situations that tap user's emotion and force them to act; a sense of unrestricted options; and replayability.
Customer Reviews:
read it before you take decisions!.......2007-02-21
Aldrich knows what he is talking about and it reads like a novel. Before you know it you have read most of it and you can reproduce it because of the catchy examples and arguments.
Gave me food for thought while designing e-learning for prisoners and stops me going down the tracks the market wants you to follow.
Ernst Duvert
what it takes.......2005-08-03
This book is really a case study of creating developing and working through the giant project of making a true simulation game where the gamer can be in control of who things go. In the business leadership scenarios mentioned one can learn a great deal
Infotainment and Evangelism.......2004-10-26
High profile e-learning industry analyst Clark Aldrich became disenchanted with the yawning gap between the promise of e-learning and the reality. Attracted by the potential application of computer gaming techniques for training simulation purposes, he quit his job with the Gartner Group and joined a project team attempting to design a computer-based leadership development simulation. The result was Simulearn's Virtual Leader. Aldrich's book recounts the experience in this book.
Despite the promise of the title, the book is a curious mix of speculation, case study, and product promotion. Aldrich provides accessible frameworks for thinking about the underlying design considerations for the development of simulations, and some useful insights into the analysis of content and development of simulation architecture. Yet the book is not a tool kit or primer for would-be designers - the advice is rarely actionable - nor is it a deep study of the concepts and application of simulation models. As such its greatest value is as an introductory case study into aspects of simulation design. The case in question is the development of Simulearn's Virtual Leader product, and the book gives little insight into other forms of electronic or other simulations. The author is a Vice President of Simulearn, so his views are not impartial.
Aldrich makes some refreshingly provocative assertions: e-learning has failed to deliver because it's not sufficiently user-focused - it has been sold to senior managers as means of lowering the cost of training, rather than enriching the value of learning. Aldrich believes that education and vocational training are too "linear", emphasizing the acquisition of facts in a sequential, guided way rather than "open-ended", allowing the development of decision-making, interpersonal communication and creative capabilities required for success in work. In contrast, simulations offer rich combinations of linear, cyclical and open-ended learning, with the freedom to make mistakes, try new approaches and hone skills in a secure environment.
The book is often entertaining. Aldrich's account of the analysis of the leadership content in order to arrive at an underlying simulation model and architecture is amusing - framed as a quest to find the meaning of leadership and render it into electronic simulation, with himself as hero. It is slightly clouded by digressions on the nature of leadership - Aldrich seems to approach the subject with little background, and is suprised to find that (to paraphrase Warren Bennis) so much been written by so many to so little effect.
A number of glaring issues go unexamined: the leadership model and the simulation design of Virtual Leader require a standard of behaviour and ethics that are possibly more ideology than reality. Success in Virual Leader requires a degree of conventional virtue that most organizations espouse but is not always practiced by those in power. A fundamentally Machiavellian approach apparently won't work in Virtual Leader, but it is arguably an effective means of gaining and retaining power in most organisations. The player's experience of Virtual Leader is not evident from the descriptions -despite extensive descriptions of the design process and interface, the book gives little insight into how the player interacts with the game.
Aldrich is evangelical, which gives his writing energy and persuasive power, but like many evangelists, he is strong on belief and short on evidence for his views. While he is right to question the validity of conventional models of education and learning, his opinions are largely speculation, or based on the anecdotal evidence of others or his own experience.
And despite the evangelism, if Aldrich's predictions hold true, most organisations will never design a simulation using his approach. They are prohibitively expensive, costing many millions of dollars. At best, they may purchase an off-the-shelf simulation, and customise it to some extent, which is possibly one of the promotional intentions of the book.
An easy read that will have you thinking for a long time........2004-09-20
This book has a great casual style that makes it accessible to anyone, yet the ideas are significant.
It's pretty cool - he describes the process he went through to create a game to help people learn leadership skills. What I found interesting is how he came to define leadership, since he had to do it in a way that would permit 'quantization' and definition as a simulation. He admits that the ideas are not new, but I think his perspective is a fresh one. The way he has put them together is definitely new. The result is a visualization of leadership that plays on in your mind - great stuff.
It is also an interesting account of the process he went through when designing his simulation/game. When organized and well written, accounts of groups solving complex problems can be very illuminating, and this one certainly succeeds there too.
I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in leadership; e-Learning; and problem-solving.
Timely, Needed, and Important.......2004-07-12
Every person who has played a modern-day simulation game has had to wonder how that level of interaction can be used to teach and train. Simulation and the Future of Learning doesn't just explain that it's possible, it proves it.
Aldrich's extensive background in e-learning products gives him a very qualified view of what needs to improve in the future of learning. The answer is simulations. Real-time, engaging and realistic simulations. He explains in detail the hurdles, headaches, and horrors of developing what has become one of the best leadership training tools on the market--Virtual Leader.
While there is little explanation of instructional theory and methods, this book is HIGHLY recommended to any organization looking to get into the educational simulation business. It provides a realistic picture of the decisions designers will face when building the next generation of learning products.
Average customer rating:
- A must for Location Models
- Comprehensive math model of location and network
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Network and Discrete Location: Models, Algorithms, and Applications
Mark S. Daskin
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Logistics Systems Analysis
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Facility Location: Applications and Theory
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Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity
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Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications
ASIN: 047101897X |
Book Description
The comprehensive introduction to the art and science of locating facilities to make your organization more efficient, effective, and profitable. For the professional siting facilities, the task of translating organizational goals and objectives into concrete facilities requires a working familiarity with the theoretical and practical fundamentals of facility location planning and modeling. The first hands-on guide to using and developing facility location models, Network and Discrete Location offers a practiceoriented introduction to model-building methods and solution algorithms, complete with software to solve classical problems of realistic size and end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader's understanding. The text introduces the reader to the key classical location problems (covering, center, median, and fixed charge) which form the nucleus of facility location modeling. It also discusses real-life extensions of the basic models used in locating: production and distribution facilities, interacting services and facilities, and undesirable facilities. The book outlines a host of methodological tools for solving location models and provides insights into when each approach is useful and what information it provides. Designed to give readers a working familiarity with the basic facility location model types as well as an intuitive knowledge of the uses and limits of modeling techniques, Network and Discrete Location brings students and professionals alike swiftly from basic theory to technical fluency.
Customer Reviews:
A must for Location Models.......2004-08-07
I am a PhD student in Operations Management and this is one of the best books in Location Management. Very clear and very precise, I did not need a class to understand the material. Its definitely a must for any body who wants a background on Location Models
Comprehensive math model of location and network.......2000-09-04
This is the 2nd best book after Ahuja et.al. book (Network Flows : Theory, Algorithms, and Applications, 1993). As I said, it's the 2nd best book -so don't be surprised if you found Ahuja's book more useful. However, Daskin did good job to compile both location and network analysis in a single text book. We can see many issues in these areas in this book. I'd love to see more integration both math model and algorithm in this book though. If you don't have Ahuja's book, you may wanna grasp one (it's out-of-stock) before getting this book. However, if you are new to do research in location and network, grasp Daskin's book. You won't be disappointed with this book!
Book Description
This practical 'how-to'book describes all the key operations of ARIS Toolset - the market leading Business Process Modelling Tool. Using lots of screen shots and plenty of practical examples, Rob Davis shows how ARIS can be used to model 'your' business processes.Based on his experience of using ARIS in British Telecommunications plc, the author describes practical ways of using ARIS Toolset:- Explaining the models and techniques that will enable new users to start modelling quickly and effectively.- Introducing tips and short cuts which make using the tool much easier.- Giving insights into the ARIS concepts.- Explaining the rationale behind alternative ways of using the tool, their benefits and the trade-offs involved.- Tackling issues found in real projects (e.g. complex model structures, handling variety, etc), as opposed to the simple examples given in many books.In addition to describing how to use the tool, Rob Davis discusses how to create standards for using ARIS as well as giving guidance on how to use ARIS for process capture and design.Business Process Modelling with ARIS is a 'must have'for every user of ARIS.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent reference for ARIS.......2005-03-11
This is an excellent reference book on ARIS. It is really a "must have" for anyone learning and using ARIS. It is well written and well structured. The only reason I've rated it at 4 stars is because it is based on Release 5 of ARIS. An updated edition would be great.
Best book written about Aris.......2003-10-17
This book explains quite good how to use Aris in practice. However it's quite heavy to read through. There could be more pictures and charts to get things clearer and easier to understand. But still absolutely the best book about Aris.
Book Description
This book teaches the reader how to build financial models—not templates—with step-by-step instructions in Excel.
Progressing from simple examples to practical, real-world applications, this book covers modeling for bonds and fixed income securities; stocks and security analysis; and options, futures, and derivatives.
For financial planners and analysts.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent way to learn about building spreadsheets for investment analysis.......2005-12-10
I am a huge fan of this book for several reasons. First, I believe that Professor Holden is absolutely right in trying to move finance from a calculator driven study to spreadsheets. Everyone uses spreadsheets in their work, NOT calculators. So, it is not only useful to use spreadsheets, but to learn how to build them.
Another very nice thing about this book is that it uses plain vanilla Excel. You don't need any special add-ins. This allows the user to understand what Excel on its own is capable of (and that is quite a bit). It also means the student doesn't have to buy anything more than this book to get everything the author intended.
I also like the way he takes the student along. You build the first spreadsheet with the steps he provides, and then you modify that to make the second, and then the third, and so on. You get to see the increasingly powerful things one can do with Excel. The graphs he has one build also help because it allows you to change different values and immediately see how it changes the graph. This is immensely important in helping the student develop intuitions about how the changing of this or that number affects the topic of the spreadsheet.
This book on Investments begins with bonds. You learn how to read bond listings, do bond pricing, learn about the concept of duration, bond convexity, using the yield curve, dynamics of the US yield curve, linear models of the yield curve, and something called the Vasicek Model.
Part 2 focuses on topics related to stocks. Portfolio optimization, diversification and lowering risk, life-cycle financial planning, dividend discount models, and the Du Pont System of Ratio Analysis.
Part 3 deals with Options and Futures. Option payoffs and profits, option trading strategies, put-call parity, binomial option pricing, Black Scholes option pricing, Spto-Futures Parity (cost of carry), and interest rate partiy.
The notation in the book is compatible with the Zvi Bodie book on Investments, but the CD has key chapters in the notation compatible with the Francis, Haugen, Jones, Reilly, and Sharpe texts. The CD also supplies databases for the yield curve spreadsheets.
Terrific book for finance classes or as a supplement to your own study.
Excellent fundamental Modeling text........2005-07-11
Craig W. Holden's "Excel Modeling in Investments" came as an excellent surprise to me when I received a faculty review copy from the publisher. I have long used Simon Benninga's competing text "Financial Modeling in Excel" to teach undergraduate and graduate financial modeling courses, however, I seriously am considering switching to Holden's EMinI. Holden correctly emphasizes discounting a bond's value on various yield curves, rather than a linear or fixed discount rate as in Benninga. Holden has some flaws, his layouts for binomial pricing models are inefficient for adapting to trinomial converging tree models, for example, but Holden is the only serious rival to Benninga in coverage of the major topics of modeling. Holden covers bonds, duration, convexity, portfolio optimization, financial planning, and the leading option pricing models. In addition, he covers cost of carry in the context of spot and futures prices, and interest rate parity. Holden does not cover Value at Risk, cheapest to deliver bonds, and has little on Visual Basic. However he does cover the Vasicek and Cox-Ingersoll-Ross interest rate models more thoroughly than Benninga. Holden's flaws are many: there is no index, and this is a text that cries out for one. Similarly, the footnotes are inadequate, and a broad "Further Reading" and bibliography should be here. Holden also suffers from being written as a companion text to popular finance textbooks such as Bodie Kane and Marcus, however, one always has the impression that the author was looking more to maximizing the market share of the text than really selecting the best chapters. We can only hope that Holden follows the better angels of his nature and includes more detail and chapters, perhaps on Monte Carlo simulation, VaR, and VBA programming. The CD-Rom, while helpful, is a little light, but this is the author's intention for he wishes students to build their own models from scratch.
In summary, I heartily recommend this book coupled with Benninga's more detailed "Financial Modeling in Excel" and find the practical emphasis indispensable for those working with or using a theoretical text such as Bodie Kane and Marcus. For those students that want careers in finance, this book is fundamental, primary, and necessary, for it emphasizes practical skills you will be executing everyday at a much higher level in a bank or asset management firm. Master these skills and models now before beginning your career and the acceleration of your promotions responsibilities will exceed those of your peers quickly.
A Good Supplement for Investments Classes.......2004-04-24
This book is not an end unto itself, but it is an excellent companion to the leading investment finance texts.
The book is oriented toward the graduate student (MBA), and the texts it parallels are the most popular MBA texts on the market. Whether you are using texts by any of the major publishers, the author Craig Holden has created these spreadsheeting materials to work directly with the text. It paralles directly the most popular text, but then it also comes with outlines and notation changes to fit with the other major texts.
The update (this is the second edition) is useful, but the first edition(s) were actually separate books. I preferred the separate book for each major author, but Holden is very succinct in his ability to tie this book to them all without the need for two or three different versions.
Holden also wrote, and Prentice Hall published, versions that tie to undergraduate investments texts, as well as both graduate and undergraduate corporate finance books.
In the first edition, the accompanying CD had an interactive version of the book. Unlike that first edition, the CD with this second edition does not carry the entire contents of the book; but that is OK, since it is easier to read the book than watch the CD on a computer screen. However, Holden makes very few actual spreadsheets available on the CD. So, except for print versions in the text, if you want to see the models, you have to build the models.
The book supports ONLY Excel. Personally, I always thought Lotus 1-2-3 was a better product and I would love to see such a book to support Lotus, but the world has gone Microsoft, and Excel is ubiquitous.
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