As financial markets are undergoing more complicated changes driven by technical innovations, knowledge of financial modeling becomes extremely important to those who want to understand financial trends and who desire to navigate through the world of finance. In fact, a huge amount of the work that Wall Street analysts and managers do is done on the Excel software. With reliable materials and some efforts, you can also handle and build a variety of financial and analytical models using Excel.

 
Financial Modeling in Excel authored by Frank Hugh Koger, associate teaching professor of Peking University HSBC Business School (PHBS), has been recently published by Peking University Press. This book is borne from his own lecture notes used to teach a well-receiving course of the same name, which earned the Excellent Course Award of Peking University in 2017. According to Professor Koger, the book “delves deeper into Excel modeling of financial applications than other comparable books.”
 
The book consists of 17 chapters that cover basics of Excel functionality, absolute valuation, portfolio management, options, and bonds. All chapters include screenshots of Excel worksheets that demonstrate financial modeling in action, showing the reader how to produce financial models using the programming language of Excel, for instance, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).  In addition, it also presents several detailed models used by practitioners, and includes several sections that teach the reader the relevant financial concepts modeled as needed.
 
Thus, this book offers a sound grounding in financial concepts, financial modeling, as well as VBA coding, and many detailed applications. “The first half of the book features many applications, and the second half explains the usage of VBA code and serves as a reference,” Professor Koger said, adding that a valuable asset associated with the textbook is a copy of the Excel file used to generate all models.
 
“The book is not overly technical, as it does not offer math for the sake of match,” Professor Koger noted in the preface. According to him, the level of treatment is advanced relative to that of most other textbooks that address this subject: Specifically, it is appropriate for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students of finance, and is relevant for practitioners who look for tools and techniques to enhance their abilities to tackle new challenges.

About the author 



Frank Hugh Koger
PHBS associate teaching professor
Ph.D. in finance from Tulane University
Research interests in corporate finance and governance, heterogeneous beliefs and agents, investments

By Annie Jin