The market leading Essentials of Investments, 6e by Bodie, Kane and Marcus is an undergraduate textbook on investment analysis, presenting the practical applications of investment theory to convey insights of practical value. The authors have eliminated unnecessary mathematical detail and concentrate on the intuition and insights that will be useful to practitioners throughout their careers as new ideas and challenges emerge from the financial marketplace. Essentials maintains the theme of asset allocation (authors discuss asset pricing and trading then apply these theories to portfolio planning in real-world securities markets that are governed by risk/return relationships).
Zvi Bodie is the Norman and Adele Barron Professor of Management at Boston University. He has published widely on pension finance and investment strategy in leading professional journals.
Bodie's books include Foundations of Pension Finance, Pensions in the U.S. Economy, Issues in Pension Economics, and Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System. His textbook, Investments, is the market leader and is used in the certification programs of the CFA Institute and the Society of Actuaries. His textbook Financial Economics is coauthored by Robert C. Merton.
He has served on the finance faculty at the Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management. He sits on the QFINANCE Advisory Board.[citation needed] In 2007 the Retirement Income Industry Association gave Bodie their Lifetime Achievement Award for applied research.
He holds a Ph.D in economics (1975) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This book is more of an intermediate level, not recommended for beginners. Some examples of the end-of-chapter problems are provided in excel format via online student resources, which is very helpful. But you won't be able to the answers for most of the problems. All in all, quite a good read for those who want to learn more about portfolio management.