They say you can tell everything about someone by taking a look at his bedside reading list. Here is a new feature that shares my bed side reading habits as well as reviews one handy and useful book that helped me get to the next stage of understanding in this field.
My book of the week is:
Fixed Income Securities, Second edition, Bruce Tuckman
The Tuckman textbook stands out for many reasons. First unlike most computational finance reference sources, it is actually written in English. Paul Petty at Goldman Sachs told me once that he would only read my summary recommendation on the value at risk upgrade if I kept all numbers and equations out of it. While Tuckman manages to smuggle in a few Greek symbols and lots of numbers inside, he does it with such grace that it becomes part of your conversation with him.
I was introduced to Bruce when the book became prescribed reading by the Society of Actuaries for the Advance Derivative course (the old V-480 exam). In my first few reads when I read his introduction to term structure modeling, I actually wept since Bruce lucidly explained in a few pages concepts that I had struggled to comprehend after 18 readings of John C. Hull.
Fixed Income Mathematics, Term structure modeling, Interest Rate simulators, Calibration of interest rates models, repurchase contracts and mortgage backed securities. If you need an easy to read, handy reference for all of the above topics without breaking your budget or your desk, Fixed Income Securities (University edition) by Bruce Tuckman is the book for you. When working in the field I end up using Tuckman far more than the Handbook of Fixed Income securities by Fabozzi or John C. Hull.
My heavy finance reading recommendations-books to put you to sleep and more
Computational Finance on Amazon