An Intuitive Introduction to Finance and Derivatives

This book gives a self-contained, intuitive overview of some of the most important topics of finance, such as investment risk, market pricing and market efficiency, arbitrage, hedging, and the pricing and application of financial derivatives. It provides a first-principles introduction to the relevant material and concepts, emphasising intuition. Financial terminology, and the understanding implicit therein, is carefully introduced. The books starts with finance in the most general terms, and gradually specialises to investment theory and then derivatives. This book is tailor-made for readers new to finance, such as graduate students entering or interested in finance, or financial practitioners moving to a more quantitative role.

Chapter 1 Preliminaries. - Chapter 2 Risk and Expected Utility. - Chapter 3 Market Pricing and Market E ciency. - Chapter 4 Modern Portfolio Theory. - Chapter 5 Asset Pricing. - Chapter 6 Introduction to Derivatives. - Chapter 7 Arbitrage and Model-free Pricing Methods- Chapter 8 Modelling, Pricing and Hedging