A Course in Derivative Securities: Introduction to Theory and Computation (Springer Finance)

I have been teaching from the book, and found a number of virtues. I used it in a beginning graduate course, but one which was very interdisciplinary. I aimed at covering all the relevant topics for the subject, not stressing one (too much!) over the others.Now the book is aimed at MBA students, and I used it in a course with students from a handful of departments.But for this purpose the level and the details in Kerry Back's book was on target.It helps student who come with a minimal mathematical background to be able quickly to absorb some main principles.And at the same time it helps math students to understand ideas from economics and from finance.The book offers an effective entry into the fundamentals of probability space, random variables, and Black-Scholes.In particular, it offers insight into Black-Scholes, that doesn't presuppose, on the part of readers, a lot of PDE theory.Kerry Back's choice of VBA/Excel offers way students can easily start to play with examples, and to generate their own examples.For my use in a math course, I picked a number of books to use as supplementary reading, for example Oksendal et al, Krylov, Shreve, Wilmott et al, and Baz et al.Review by Palle Jorgensen, October 2011.

Very helpful book, provides the link betweeen theory and mathematical implementation. Moreover, professor Beck has created solution material for problems, which enable futher learning experience. The book is technical to a reasonable degree, ie not overwhelming anyone without phd in physics, but remains very accessible to an average economist reader.