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Comment by boppo1

3 years ago

The book is from 2001; are there any substantial changes in the landscape a motivated finance student should be aware of?

As a beginner book, no there are no substantial changes on what a beginner should read.

However, while the simple discounting formulas described (likely, haven't read other than the list of contents) in the book were at the time actually used more or less as-is to value instruments in the derivative markets, nowadays they are seldomly used on their own. Two major developments there are multi curve discounting taking collateralization into account and different valuation adjustments, collectively known as XVAs.

That is not to say you do not need to understand the beginner basics, vice versa, iys just that nowadays there is much more nuance in actual valuation.

Edit: to add, I'm not sure if its useful to study these nuances in detail, unless you are going to actually work on the markets. In the big picture their details are likely not worth it, but of course it is good to try to understand why these developments have been needed/wanted by market participants.

  • I had wanted to work in markets, but my GPA (& now post-grad resume) didn't quite work out for it. I don't do well in the lecture-homework format. Nonetheless I'm interested in the minutiae, so thank you for the elucidation!

There’s a free HTML version on my website, which has some green-boxed updates. But even without those, the book is an excellent beginner’s guide to the interest rate markets. (I am the author, so might be thought not to have a NPoV.)