Guide to Financial Markets - Hardcover

Levinson, Marc

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576603431 ISBN 13: 9781576603437

Publisher: Bloomberg Press, 2009

Synopsis

Recent market turbulence makes it abundantly clear how important it is to understand the key markets. This book is the definitive guide to why different markets exist, how they operate, and how they are interrelated.

Extensively revised and updated, the new Fifth Edition of Guide to Financial Markets brings the reader up to date with the latest developments in financial instruments and provides a clear and incisive guide to this increasingly complex world.

With chapters on the markets that deal with money, foreign exchange, equities, bonds, commodities, futures, options, and other derivatives, this new edition looks at why these markets exist, how they work, and who trades in them, and provides a rundown of the factors that affect prices and rates.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The credit crunch and ensuing financial crisis showed just how volatile the financial markets can be. Even slight movements in market prices can have substantial effects on national economies, businesses and institutional investors such as pension funds. Individual investors, meanwhile, face choices among highly complex financial products that are increasingly difficult to get to grips with. Astute use of the financial markets can make all the difference to the bottom line. But in order to act astutely you must understand what you are doing.

The Guide to Financial Markets provides a clear explanation of the different markets. It goes well beyond stocks and bonds to explain the purposes and uses of equity futures and options, securitised instruments, and innovations such as the credit derivatives that can help manage risk but can also prove toxic when not used carefully. And so for anyone who wants a good understanding of:

• why markets matter

• international fixed-income markets

• foreign-exchange markets

• equity markets

• money markets

• futures and options markets

• bond markets

• derivatives markets

• securitisation

there is no better reference source than this fully revised and updated fifth edition of the Guide to Financial Markets.

From the Inside Flap:

Financial markets have been around ever since people settled down to growing crops and trading them with each other. They take many different forms and operate in many different ways. But all of them, whether highly organised, like the New York Stock Exchange, or highly informal, like money-changers in Africa, serve the same basic functions, which range from providing a way of setting prices and valuing assets, through raising capital or investing it, to managing exposure to risk.

The credit crunch and ensuing financial crisis brought home to everyone the enormous influence that financial markets exercise and highlighted the pace of innovation in them and the instruments they trade. This book explains why the different financial markets exist, how they work and who trades in them, and gives a run-down of the factors that affect prices and rates.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomberg Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1576603431
• ISBN 13: 9781576603437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 250