"Essentials of Investments, Twelfth Edition, is intended as a textbook on investment analysis most applicable for a student's first course in investments. The chapters are written in a modular format to give instructors the flexibility to either omit certain chapters or rearrange their order....

Even if the correct modeling of default dependence is essential for the valuation of portfolio credit derivatives, for the pricing of synthetic CDOs a one-factor Gaussian copula model with constant and equalpairwise correlationsfor all assets in the reference portfolio has become the standard...