Recent turbulence in the financial markets has highlighted the need for diversified portfolios with lower correlations between the different investments. Life settlements meet this need, offering investors the prospect of high, stable returns, uncorrelated with the broader financial markets.This book provides readers of all levels of experience with essential information on the process surrounding the acquisition and management of a portfolio of life settlements; the assessment, mo...

The ultimate guide for bank management: how to survive and thrive throughout the business cycleAn essential guide for bankers and students of finance everywhere, The Principles of Banking reiterates that the primary requirement of banking—sound capital and liquidity risk management—had been forgotten in the years prior to the financial crash. Serving as a policy guide for market practitioners and regulators at all levels, the book explains the keys to succ...

The Forex Options Course is a practical, hands-on guide to understanding and trading forex options. Designed to build a trader's knowledge base in a step-by-step manner, this reliable resource moves from the straightforward to the more sophisticated with discussions of everything from basic plain vanilla calls and puts to intriguing first-generation exotic binary options. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, The Forex Options Course will help you develop the...

This book on personal financial planning and wealth management employs the lifecycle model of financial economics. The central idea of 'consumption smoothing' is used to connect chapters and topics such as saving and investment, debt management, risk management and retirement planning. The first part of the book is nontechnical and aimed at a wide audience with no special technical background. The second part of the book provides a rigorous presentation of the lifecycle model from first pr...

A profitable purchase for investment enthusiasts.The Pocket Idiot's Guide® to Direct Stock Investing reveals an innovative style of investment that has been steadily growing under the huge shadow of Wall Street-home investors opening a Direct Stock Purchase (DSP) or a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP) now offered by hundreds of major corporations, commission free. Investment guru Douglas Gerlach, an expert in this style of guerrilla investing, shows invest...

A one-stop resource for understanding and applying current International Financial Reporting StandardsThe move to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is the single most important initiative in the financial reporting world, with more than 100 countries requiring or allowing the use of IFRS for the preparation of financial statements by publicly held companies. It is expected that by 2011, more than 150 countries will be converting to it.It's ...

Praise for Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management“A must-have reference for any equity portfolio manager or MBA student, this book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of equity portfolio management, from factor models to tax management.” ERIC ROSENFELD, Principal & Co-founder of JWM Partners“This is an ambitious book that both develops the broad range of artillery employed in quantitative equity investment management and provides...

With the exponential growth in financial derivatives, accounting standards setters have had to keep pace and devise new ways of accounting for transactions involving these instruments, especially hedging activities. This book addresses the essential elements of these developments. The early chapters provide a basic foundation by discussing the concepts of risk, risk types and measurement, and risk management. This is followed by an introduction to the nature and valuation of free standing ...

Essential insights on the various aspects of financial derivativesIf you want to understand derivatives without getting bogged down by the mathematics surrounding their pricing and valuation, Financial Derivatives is the book for you. Through in-depth insights gleaned from years of financial experience, Robert Kolb and James Overdahl clearly explain what derivatives are and how you can prudently use them within the context of your underlying business activities.

Full coverage of ETF investments from an expert in the fieldThe initial edition of Gary Gastineau's The Exchange-Traded Fund Manual was one of the first books to describe and analyze ETFs. It made the case for the superiority of the structure of investor-friendly ETFs over mutual funds and helped investors select better funds among the ETFs available.With this new edition*,* Gastineau provides comprehensive information on the latest developments in...

"TAIL RISKS" originate from the failure of mean reversion and the idealized bell curve of asset returns, which assumes that highly probable outcomes occur near the center of the curve and that unlikely occurrences, good and bad, happen rarely, if at all, at either "tail" of the curve. Ever since the global financial crisis, protecting investments against these severe tail events has become a priority for investors and money managers, but it is something Vineer Bhansali and his team at PIMC...

This is a complete guide to the pricing and risk management of convertible bond portfolios. Convertible bonds can be complex because they have both equity and debt like features and new market entrants will usually find that they have either a knowledge of fixed income mathematics or of equity derivatives and therefore have no idea how to incorporate credit and equity together into their existing pricing tools.Part I of the book covers the impact that the 2008 credit crunch has had...