经典!
What is Finance
Finance is about the bottom line of business activities
Every business is a process of acquiring and disposing assets
Real asset –tangible and intangible
Financial assets
Objectives of business
Valuation of assets
Management of assets
Valuation is the central issue of finance
Money vs. Finance
What is Financial Engineering?
Generalizing: Financial Engineering involves the design, the development, and the implementation of innovative financial instruments and processes, and the formulation of creative solutions to problems in finance.
Specializing: Financial Engineering is risk management via creative structural tools
Unifying Principles of Finance
No arbitrage
Preference
Optimization
Market in equilibrium
Unifying Equation of Valuation
P=E(mx)
Where m is state-dependent discount factor
X is the state dependent payoff (cash flow)
Consequence of no arbitrage equilibrium
Conservation law of value of cash flow: the whole is equal to the sum of components
Composition and de-composition of cash flow