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fund been in operation? Front Matter Preface The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2001           P


R E F A C E                     We wrote the first edition of this textbook more than ten years ago. The intervening years have been a period of rapid and profound change in the investments industry. This is due in part to an abundance of newly designed securities, in part to the creation of new trading strategies that would have been impossible without concurrent advances in computer tech- nology, and in part to rapid advances in the theory of investments that have come out of the academic community. In no other field, perhaps, is the transmission of theory to real-world practice as rapid as is now commonplace in the financial industry. These developments place new burdens on practitioners and teachers of investments far beyond what was re- quired only a short while ago. Investments, Fifth Edition, is intended primarily as a textbook for courses in investment analysis. Our guiding principle has been to present the material in a framework that is or- ganized by a central core of consistent fundamental principles. We make every attempt to strip away unnecessary mathematical and technical detail, and we have concentrated on providing the intuition that may guide students and practitioners as they confront new ideas and challenges in their professional lives. This text will introduce you to major issues currently of concern to all investors. It can give you the skills to conduct a sophisticated assessment of current issues and debates cov- ered by both the popular media as well as more specialized finance journals. Whether you plan to become an investment professional, or simply a sophisticated individual investor, you will find these skills essential. Our primary goal is to present material of practical value, but all three of us are active researchers in the science of financial economics and find virtually all of the material in this book to be of great intellectual interest. Fortunately, we think, there is no contradiction in the field of investments between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of money. Quite the opposite. The capital asset pricing model, the arbitrage pricing model, the efficient markets hypothesis, the option-pricing model, and the other centerpieces of modern financial research are as much intellectually satisfying subjects of scientific inquiry as they are of immense practical importance for the sophisticated investor. In our effort to link theory to practice, we also have attempted to make our approach consistent with that of the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts (ICFA), a subsidiary of the Association of Investment Management and