Financial Modelling in Practice - A Concise Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Level

The investment banking industry has changed dramatically since the 2008 financial crisis. Three of the top five investment banks in the United States have disappeared, while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have converted to commercial banking charters. This Third Edition of The Business of Investment Banking explains the changes and discusses new opportunities for students and professionals seeking to advance their careers in this intensely competitive field.

The recent financial regulation overhaul, including the Dodd-Frank legislation, is changing what investment banks do and how they do it, while the Volcker rule has shaken up trading desks everywhere.

• This new edition updates investment banking industry shifts in practices, trends, regulations, and statistics
• Includes new chapters on investment banking in BRIC countries, as Brazil, Russia, India, and China now account for a quarter of the global economy
• Explains the shift in the listing of securities away from New York to various financial centers around the world, and how major exchanges compete for the same business

Discover how to use activity-based management to improve your bottom line

The first book of its kind to focus on activity-based management in the financial services industry, Activity-Based Management for Financial Institutions: Driving Bottom Line Results will show you how to drive changes to your organization's bottom line.

After providing a brief overview of a financial services activity-based costing model, this book focuses on how to directly improve net income, covering essential topics including costing, chargeback, and pricing; implementing ABC; implementing ABM; managing organizational change; and avoiding pitfalls.

• Written for those in the financial services industry-banks, securities firms, insurance companies
• Reveals how to drive benefits to the bottom line through disciplined execution of activity-based management and organizational change management
• Provides real world examples and tools for quick results and sustained success

"A highly accessible collection of essays on contemporary thinking in performance management. Readers will get excellent overviews on the Balanced Scorecard, strategy maps, incentives, management accounting, activity-based costing, customer lifetime value, and sustainable shareholder value creation."
—Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School; coauthor of The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, The Execution Premium, and many other books

"Gary Cokins demonstrates in this book that performance management is not a mysterious black art, but a structured, process-oriented discipline. If you want your performance management system to be a smoothly running analytical machine, read and apply the ideas in this book—it's all you need."
—Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management, Babson College; coauthor of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

"Drawing on a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience gained from hundreds of customer engagements around the world, Gary Cokins offers an authoritative examination of the major dimensions of performance management. Cokins not only paints a rich and textured view of the major principles and concepts driving performance management implementations, he offers a nuanced look at the important subtleties that can spell the difference between success and failure. This is an informative and enjoyable text to read!"
—Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research, The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI); author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business

"[In this] very insightful book, the view of an integrated performance management framework with a goal to link various operational activities with business strategy is an excellent approach to manage and improve business. Gary's explanation of risk-based performance management, for providing the capability to achieve long-term objectives with reliably calculated risks, is definitely thought provoking."
—Srini Pallia, Global Head and Vice President of Business Technology Services, Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, India

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version.

The Most Complete, Authoritative Guide to Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X 

Cocoa® Programming Developer’s Handbook is a comprehensive, practical reference that brings together all the knowledge, techniques, and code that experienced Mac OS X programmers need to build rich, powerful Cocoa applications. It fully reflects the latest Cocoa innovations, including the latest architectural changes and tools introduced with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

David Chisnall addresses virtually every aspect of Cocoa application development, from advanced multimedia programming to networking. Chisnall offers deep wisdom about issues ranging from user interface design to system programming–insights available nowhere else. Each of his examples demonstrates a single aspect of the Cocoa API and illuminates modern best practices. Coverage includes  

• Combining Cocoa Foundation and Application Kit to layer rich, modern application features atop efficient low-level functions
• Mastering the Cocoa application model, including events and drawing
• Developing document-driven applications with Cocoa
• Utilizing the new Core Data framework to automate persistence in documents
• Building more sophisticated user interfaces with advanced View Objects
• Using Core Animation to create intricate animated objects with very little code
• Taking advantage of OS X’s speech recognition and synthesis APIs
• Using System-wide Address Book, Metadata Indexing, and Previewing to integrate applications smoothly into the OS X environment
• Mastering networking and other low-level system programming features
• Utilizing Cocoa’s new concurrency mechanisms, including Snow Leopard’s Grand Central

This book is the perfect follow-up to Aaron Hillegass’ renowned tutorial, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2008), and is the ideal single-source reference for experienced developers working with Cocoa on the Mac OS X or iPhone platforms.

A companion web site contains extensive downloadable source code designed for easy reuse, plus additional material on effective Cocoa programming.

Originally published in 2003, Mathematical Techniques in Finance has become a standard textbook for master's-level finance courses containing a significant quantitative element while also being suitable for finance PhD students. This fully revised second edition continues to offer a carefully crafted blend of numerical applications and theoretical grounding in economics, finance, and mathematics, and provides plenty of opportunities for students to practice applied mathematics and cutting-edge finance. Ales Cerný mixes tools from calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, numerical mathematics, and programming to analyze in an accessible way some of the most intriguing problems in financial economics. The textbook is the perfect hands-on introduction to asset pricing, optimal portfolio selection, risk measurement, and investment evaluation.

The new edition includes the most recent research in the area of incomplete markets and unhedgeable risks, adds a chapter on finite difference methods, and thoroughly updates all bibliographic references. Eighty figures, over seventy examples, twenty-five simple ready-to-run computer programs, and several spreadsheets enhance the learning experience. All computer codes have been rewritten using MATLAB and online supplementary materials have been completely updated.

• A standard textbook for graduate finance courses
• Introduction to asset pricing, portfolio selection, risk measurement, and investment evaluation
• Detailed examples and MATLAB codes integrated throughout the text
• Exercises and summaries of main points conclude each chapter

A Complete Blueprint for Maximizing the Value of Business Intelligence in the Enterprise

The typical enterprise recognizes the immense potential of business intelligence (BI) and its impact upon many facets within the organization—but it’s not easy to transform BI’s potential into real business value. In The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence, top BI expert Mike Biere presents a complete blueprint for creating winning BI strategies and infrastructure, and systematically maximizing the value of information throughout the enterprise.

This product-independent guide brings together start-to-finish guidance and practical checklists for every senior IT executive, planner, strategist, implementer, and the actual business users themselves. Drawing on thousands of hours working with enterprise customers, Biere helps decision-makers choose from today’s unprecedented spectrum of options, including the latest BI platform suites and appliances. He offers practical, “in-the-trenches” insights on a wide spectrum of planning and implementation issues, from segmenting and supporting users to working with unstructured data.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the scope of today’s BI solutions and how they fit into existing infrastructure
• Assessing new options such as SaaS and cloud-based technologies
• Avoiding technology biases and other “project killers”
• Developing effective RFIs/RFPs and proofs of concept
• Setting up competency centers and planning for skills development
• Crafting a better experience for all your business users
• Supporting the requirements of senior executives, including performance management
• Cost-justifying BI solutions and measuring success
• Working with enterprise content management, text analytics, and search
• Planning and constructing portals, mashups, and other user interfaces
• Previewing the future of BI

Once again, Robert Sedgewick provides a current and comprehensive introduction to important algorithms. The focus this time is on graph algorithms, which are increasingly critical for a wide range of applications, such as network connectivity, circuit design, scheduling, transaction processing, and resource allocation. In this book, Sedgewick offers the same successful blend of theory and practice that has made his work popular with programmers for many years. Christopher van Wyk and Sedgewick have developed concise new C++ implementations that both express the methods in a natural and direct manner and also can be used in real applications.

Algorithms in C++, Third Edition, Part 5: Graph Algorithms is the second book in Sedgewick's thoroughly revised and rewritten series. The first book, Parts 1-4, addresses fundamental algorithms, data structures, sorting, and searching. A forthcoming third book will focus on strings, geometry, and a range of advanced algorithms. Each book's expanded coverage features new algorithms and implementations, enhanced descriptions and diagrams, and a wealth of new exercises for polishing skills. A focus on abstract data types makes the programs more broadly useful and relevant for the modern object-oriented programming environment.

Coverage includes:

• A complete overview of graph properties and types
• Diagraphs and DAGs
• Minimum spanning trees
• Shortest paths
• Network flows
• Diagrams, sample C++ code, and detailed algorithm descriptions

Introducing the I Believe Bunny—a delightful new series that helps kids learn about believing, sharing, and putting their faith into action.

Children will identify with Bunny and learn along with him that God is always there to help.  Prayer works!  Little Mouse is in trouble and Bunny is the only one nearby to help her.  But, Bunny is too small.  He has to set aside his own fear and trust in God.  By putting his faith into action, Bunny is able to help Little Mouse and save the day.

Not only does this precious book teach the importance of calling on God for our every need, it helps children remember to be thankful for God's work in their lives.