Too often, finance courses stop short of making a connection between textbook financeand the problems of real-world business. Financial Modeling bridges this gapbetween theory and practice by providing a nuts-and-bolts guide to solving common financial modelswith spreadsheets. Simon Benninga takes the reader step by step through each model, showing how itcan be solved using Microsoft Excel. The long-awaited third edition of this standard text maintainsthe "cookbook" features and Excel dependence that have made the first and second editionsso popular. It also offers significant new material, with new chapters covering such topics as bankvaluation, the Black-Litterman approach to portfolio optimization, Monte Carlo methods and theirapplications to option pricing, and using array functions and formulas. Other chapters, includingthose on basic financial calculations, portfolio models, calculating the variance-covariance matrix,and generating random numbers, have been revised, with many offering substantially new and improvedmaterial. Other areas covered include financial statement modeling, leasing, standard portfolioproblems, value at risk (VaR), real options, duration and immunization, and term structure modeling.Technical chapters treat such topics as data tables, matrices, the Gauss-Seidel method, and tips forusing Excel. The last section of the text covers the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) techniquesneeded for the book. The accompanying CD contains Excel worksheets and solutions to end-of-chapterexercises.