This book gives a self-contained, intuitive overview of some of the most important topics of finance, such as investment risk, market pricing and market efficiency, arbitrage, hedging, and the pricing and application of financial derivatives. It provides a first-principles introduction to the relevant material and concepts, emphasising intuition. Financial terminology, and the understanding implicit therein, is carefully introduced. The books starts with finance in the most general terms, and gradually specialises to investment theory and then derivatives. This book is tailor-made for readers new to finance, such as graduate students entering or interested in finance, or financial practitioners moving to a more quantitative role.

Alex Backwell is a Senior Lecturer at the African Institute of Financial Markets & Risk Management at the University of Cape Town (South Africa). His research focuses on interest-rate modelling.  His work has been published in top finance journals such as the Journal of Banking & Finance and Mathematical Finance.