Thinking Finance with a view towards Risk Management

This book provides a concise presentation of finance in general and risk management in particular. Albeit an ample variety of literature exists dealing with these topics, this book is characterized by its formulations: although the formulations are kept short, all relevant arguments, definitions and links are mentioned! By this property, the book should be used for beginners in context with introductory literature such as Hull ("Options, Futures and Other Derivatives") oder lecture notes. The concise formulations and the clearly observable structures such as arguments, definitions and links allow an optimized exam prep - especially for oral exams at university and certifications such as PRMIA. Furthermore, this book might be used to optimize the individual capability of "talking about finance". This is primarily relevant for readers already working in the financial business and trying to be promoted into different fields of their company or to increase their salary: There is no easier way to prove deep knowledge in finance than providing "easy" answers to financial questions or to find counterexamples to negative properties (e.g.. "In what cases is the ValueAtRisk not subadditive und what consequences does this fact have for the Risk Management?"); the same holds for interviews in the consultant business. Regarding content, the book starts by providing ideas and concepts of utility and decision theory. Afterwards, the notion of return and return standard deviation is introduced as the central - but non-trivial ("Return compensates for risk") - category; related topics are diversification, decision theory related to risk tolerance and the CAPM model. Furthermore, the main products of finance are introduced together with its pricing. Please mind the section about pricing stock options! The second parts deals with non-trivial financial mathematics while the third talks about Risk Management (market-, credit-, operational-) with a focus on VaR (standard and advanced).