Fundamentals of Investments Information Center: Feature Summary


		Sample Chapter Table of Contents Book Preface About the Authors Supplements What's New Feature Summary


	First Time Users
	Student Edition
	Instructor Edition

Fundamentals of Investments: Valuation and Management, 5/e

Bradford D. Jordan, University of Kentucky
Thomas W. Miller, Jr., Saint Louis University

Feature Summary

Each chapter is loaded with numbered and titled Example Boxes. These real-life examples show students how to approach and solve key problems step by step. There is enough detail in the explanations so the student doesn't have to look elsewhere for additional information.
Spreadsheet Analysis exhibits illustrate directly how to use spreadsheets to do certain types of important problems, including such computationally intensive tasks as calculating Macauley duration, finding Black-Scholes-Merton option prices, and determining optimal portfolios based on Sharpe ratios.
Unique to this text, Stock-Trak Portfolio Simulations® exercises are incorporated into Fundamentals of Investments, and can be found on the book’s OLC (new to this edition, exercises used to be at the end of chapters). Stock-Trak is one of the most successful trading simulations with over 30,000 college students having trading accounts each semester. Each copy of the text includes a free subscription to Stock-Trak®, and gives students $500,000 (of play money!) in an online brokerage account, allowing them to trade stocks, options, futures, bonds, mutual funds, and international stocks.
Standard & Poor’s Problems, located in the end-of-chapter material, provide instructors for an easy method of including current real-world data into the course. The problems require the use of Standard & Poor’s Educational Version of Market Insight, and each new copy of the text includes free access. This rich online resource provides six years of financial and other qualitative data for 1,000 top companies in the renowned COMPUSTAT Ò database. New data on the site includes detailed stock reports with industry outlooks with peer group analysis, and Wall Street Consensus information, which include detailed reports, charts, and graphs of analysts’ recommendations, opinions, and earnings estimates.
“Check This” boxes conclude each major section in a chapter. They are questions for review that help students test their understanding of material before moving on to the next section.
“Investment Updates” readings are reprinted from various business press sources that provide additional real-world events and examples to illustrate the material in the chapter. Many articles are from the past two years to highlight very recent events, while others present events of more historical significance.
“Get Real” boxes are for instructors looking to give their students a taste of what it means to be an investment manager. This feature concludes each chapter (located just before the summary) and explains to students how they can actually apply the material they just learned. They encourage students--whether for practice, in a trading simulation, or with real money--to choose investments and make investment decisions and also provide some helpful tips to keep in mind.
“Test Your IQ” feature is comprised of 15 multiple-choice questions on average per chapter, many of which are taken from past CFA exams. In fact, this text is the only one that presents CFA questions in multiple-choice format, which is how they appear on the actual exam.
Students are provided with one to three practice problems per chapter with worked-out solutions to test their abilities in solving key problems related to the content of the chapter.
“What’s on the Web” provides students with three to five end of chapter activities to show them how to use them and learn from the vast amount of financial resources available on the Internet.
Work the Web boxes are expanded and completely updated. Screen shots are used to show students how to access, use, and interpret various types of key financial and market data.
Web links are provided in the margins. These are based on web addresses found in the chapter narrative and provide students with a quick way to check for current and additional information using the Internet.
Each chapter ends with a summary that highlights the important points of the chapter. This also provides a handy checklist for students when they review the chapter.

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