Essentials of Investments

This is an an undergraduate textbook on investment analysis. The authors eliminate unnecessary mathematical detail and concentrate on the intuition and insights that is useful to practitioners throughout their careers as new ideas and challenges emerge from the financial marketplace. "Essentials of Investments" maintains the theme of asset allocation, which discusses asset pricing and trading then applies these theories to portfolio planning in real-world securities markets that are governed by risk/return relationships. The book also continues to develop modern topics. The major objective in this revision is to maintain the current level in content and coverage, but work on improving the text's accessibility by enhancing presentation, pedagogy, and design.

Part One Elements of investments: investments - backgrounds and issues; financial markets and instruments; how securities are traded; mutual funds and other investment companies; investors and the investments process. Part Two Portfolio theory: risk and return - past and prologue; efficient diversification; capital asset pricing and arbitrage pricing theory; the efficient market hypothesis. Part Three Fixed-income securities: bond prices and yields; managing fixed-income investments. Part Four Security analysis: macroeconomic and industry analysis; equity valuation; financial statement analysis; technical analysis. Part Five Derivative assets - options and futures: options markets; option valuation; futures markets. Part Six Active investment management: performance evaluation and active portfolio management; international diversification.