Inno -E Books
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- Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
- Number Of Pages: 392
- Publication Date: 2002-10-15
- Sales Rank: 743412
- ISBN / ASIN: 0471521744
- EAN: 9780471521747
- Binding: Hardcover
- Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
- Studio: John Wiley & Sons
- Average Rating: 3.5
- Total Reviews: 3
Review:
One of the best books on VaR, but not suitable for beginners
I fundamentally disagree with the reviewer stating that this book should not be bought. The fact that that reviewer isn't familiar with Matlab is a shame given that he or she works as a risk manager and since Matlab is often a basic pre-requisite for doing good quantitative finance. Serious risk management demands serious numerical software and Matlab is one such tool which allows quick model implementation in the fast paced business world. Excel/VBA are definitely not suitable for good work in this field (just look up the many statistical problems that can be found in Excel's functions, for example, or try to implement some basic matrix operations using VBA). C is not great either given that the Dowd's didactic message would be lost in a sea of imperative coding logic. Not understanding that the 'svd' function is shorthand for singular value decomposition, makes me suspect that that reviewer's quantitative abilities may not at the level needed to read this book. However, I don't want to turn this review into a flame-fest advocating Matlab over all else and ignoring the content of the book itself. I think Matlab has its faults too, but Dowd made a sensible choice in using this pseudocode-like language for the examples of the models he presents. (And if Matlab is too expensive to purchase there are many free clones that work just as well: just search for 'scilab' or 'octave' on the web). But on with the review of the book itself...Download